News & Notes

It's been a rough few months for plaintiffs seeking to hold companies liable in U.S. courts for overseas violence, culminating with last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. restricting the reach of the Alien Tort Statute. But plaintiffs caught a break Wednesday in a lawsuit targeting Arab Bank over its alleged financing of the Palestinian group Hamas.

The Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) has established a $65 million dollar Late Applicants Fund (“LAF”) for individuals who are heirs of former owners of Jewish property/assets located in the former East Germany who did not previously file claims with the German government or the JCC. For those whose families owned property in eastern Germany before World War II and never filed a timely claim, this is a unique last opportunity. For more information, contact Cindy Schlanger at our office: cts@osen.us

March 16, 2012 (KARLSRHUE, GERMANY): The German High Court (Bundesgerichtshof) issued its written opinion this morning confirming that Peter Sachs is the legal owner of his father’s stolen poster collection and that a German museum must return the collection to him. In a landmark case, the High Court’s ruling restores ownership of one of the largest and most famous poster collections in the world (estimated at approximately 4,200 vintage posters) to Mr. Sachs, the American son of Hans Sachs, the Jewish collector whose life’s work was stolen by the Gestapo in 1938. An appeals court ruled last year that notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Sachs was the owner of his father’s collection and that it had been unlawfully seized by the Nazis, the court lacked authority, under German law, to compel the German Historical Museum in Berlin (“DHM”) to return the poster collection to him. The High Court, in granting Mr. Sachs’ July 2010 petition, agreed to hear the appeal because “of the fundamental importance of the case,” noting that “in cases where restitution claims were impossible to file for factual reasons at the time- as in this case-, the issues of the relationship between restitution law and general civil laws is in need of review and clarification.”