A push to regain looted art

BERLIN - A Jewish man fighting to regain possession of thousands of rare posters seized from his father by the Nazis appeared to score a victory yesterday when a Berlin court indicated it believed his father was the owner in 1938, when they were taken.

But the hearing failed to resolve the suit filed by Peter Sachs, 71, of Sarasota, Fla., and both sides vowed to press their cases.

The judges said they needed to deliberate whether further arguments were necessary before issuing a verdict in the case, which involves a third of 12,500 rare posters seized from the home of Hans Sachs in 1938 on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

The Sachs family fled to the United States soon afterward, assuming the posters that had been left behind were lost forever. It wasn't until the mid-1960s that Hans Sachs learned that an East Berlin museum had some and wrote to the communist authorities about viewing them, to no avail. He died in 1974 without seeing them again.

In 1990, after communism fell, the collection was turned over to the German Historical Museum, which possesses more than 4,000 of the posters, worth $5.9 million.