Germany’s top appeals court ruled Friday that Deutsches Historisches Museum must return a collection of more than 4,000 posters to the son of Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist who fled Nazi Germany.

The son, Peter Sachs, is a retired airline pilot from Sarasota, Fla.

Gestapo officials seized the posters from the senior Sachs in 1938, saying that Joseph Goebbels wanted them for a new museum.

The government-run Berlin museum has estimated that the posters are worth $5.9 million, according to Bloomberg News. The court issued a statement saying that “the owner of art lost due to Nazi injustices must be able to demand it back from the person who possesses it now, in a case where the work was missing after the war, and therefore couldn’t be returned according to Allied restitution laws.”

“I can’t describe what this means to me on a personal level,” Sachs reportedly said in a statement distributed by his attorney. “It feels like vindication for my father, a final recognition of the life he lost and never got back.”

It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!

We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.

This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions. 

We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.

As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday! 

Don't just read the Forward - invest in it. Make a gift and our board will match it.

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$129 $180 $360 OTHER AMOUNT