page_title: Hans Sachs (poster collector)
section_title: Arrest, escape from Germany and life in America
hierarchical_section_title: Hans Sachs (poster collector) / Arrest, escape from Germany and life in America
caption_attribution_description: label on poster owned by Henry Townsend, the source, and Jessica Townsend, niece of Hans Sachs
context_page_description: Hans Sachs was a Berlin dentist whose greatest accomplishment came from his passion for posters. He was the leading founder of an important group devoted to collecting posters which started an influential poster magazine. Before the seizure of his collection of 12,500 posters during Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, he had the largest collection of posters in Germany, probably in the world. He was able to escape to the United States, but he never regained possession of the posters. After years of court battles, 4344 posters were returned to his son in 2013. Some will be given to museums, but most have been or will be sold at auction.
context_section_description: On 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht, he was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp. The collection was stolen by order of Joseph Goebbels, who wanted them for a proposed new wing devoted to business art in the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (Museum of Decorative Arts). After 17 days in the concentration camp, Sachs was released, and with his second wife Felicia and their one-year-old son Peter were able to escape from Germany, first to London for a few days, and then to New York. From his former collection he was able to take with him only the 31 posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, which he later sold in America. Despite a recommendation from his former patient in Berlin, Albert Einstein, that he was well qualified to practice dentistry, he had to return to school, getting a second doctorate in dentistry from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in 1941. 
  In the 1950s, he was told by the West German government that the posters had been destroyed by the Russians. In 1961 he accepted compensation of about 225,000 marks, then about $25,000. But in 1966, many were rediscovered in East Berlin, in the basement of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). Sachs's posters were identified by his label affixed to the back. Although Sachs flew to Berlin in 1974, he was not allowed to enter East Berlin. He died that year on March 21 without seeing his posters again.
caption: Label affixed to the Karen Zabel poster (see poster image in Commons)
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