Art News

German Court Says US Man can’t Demand Posters’ Return

BERLIN (AP).- A court has ruled that a Jewish man whose father lost his collection of thousands of rare posters to the Nazis can’t demand their return from a German museum, it said Friday. A Berlin appeals court said it ruled that while Peter Sachs, the son of collector Hans Sachs, is the owner of the posters, now worth millions, he isn’t entitled to their restitution by the government-owned German Historical Museum. The court did not immediately explain its reasoning behind the decision. The Thursday ruling partly reversed one by a lower court last year that said the museum must return a poster for “Simplicissimus,” a satirical German weekly magazine, showing a red bulldog. The case was a test of Sachs’ claim to the 4,300 surviving posters held by the museum, now worth at least euro4.5 million ($6.3 million). The lower court found that Hans Sachs never gave up ownership of the collection of 12,500 posters taken from his home on the Nazis’ orders in 1938. His family fled to the