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"The net result will be that a substantially larger number of the posters from this collection will be on public view than would have been had they remained in the German Historical Museum," Osen said. Sachs is also going to hold onto four of the posters for himself -- including an advertisement for Manoli cigarettes by artist Lucian Bernhard. He said it has special significance to him because Bernhard co-founded the art publication Das Plakat, or The Poster, with his father in 1910 and was a family friend. "As a child I knew Lucian Bernhard. He used to come and visit at the house, so that one had a personal meaning to me," he said. Born in 1881, Hans Sachs began collecting posters while in high school. By 1905, he was Germany's leading private poster collector, with an eventual total of 12,500 posters
-- many displayed in a specially built gallery in his home. The entire collection was seized in the summer of 1938 on the order of Goebbels, who wanted it for a museum, when Peter Sachs was a year old. On Nov. 9, 1938, during the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews, Hans Sachs was arrested and thrown into Sachsenhausen. He was released two weeks later, thanks to the efforts of his wife who somehow managed to wrangle British visas for him and the family. They fled and eventually ended up in the United States. After the war, Hans Sachs assumed the collection had been destroyed and accepted compensation of about 225,000 German marks (then worth about $50,000) from West Germany in 1961. He learned five years later, however, that part of the collection had survived the war and been turned over to an East Berlin museum. It's not known what happened to the other posters. Sachs wrote the communist authorities about seeing the posters or even bringing an exhibit to the West to no avail. He died in 1974 without ever seeing them again. The posters became part of the German Historical Museum's collection in 1990, after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Peter Sachs only learned of the existence of the collection in 2005, and began fighting then for their return. Legal battles went all the way to Germany's top federal appeals court, which ruled last March in favor of Sachs, saying that if the museum kept the posters it would be akin to perpetuating the crimes of the Nazis. Since being returned the posters Sachs has repaid the 1961 restitution payment, and said he was relieved that the ordeal was now over. "I don't really feel a sense of victory as much as I do of vindication," he said. "I think it's absurd that this should have occurred in the first place; I think the museum simply should have relinquished them in the beginning on moral grounds."
[Associated
Press;
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