German high court revives Jehovah's Witnesses' claim to a Nazi-persecution archive, orders new hearing

Germany's Federal Court of Justice set aside a lower-court ruling on 26 June 2026 and ordered a fresh hearing in a dispute over who owns a family archive that documents the Nazi persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses — more than 1,000 photographs, letters, arrest warrants and death sentences now held by a Bundeswehr military-history museum in Dresden.

The court's Fifth Civil Senate, in case V ZR 92/25, quashed the judgment of the Oberlandesgericht Köln (Cologne Higher Regional Court) and remanded the case for reconsideration. It did not award the archive to anyone.^[1]

What the court decided — and did not

At issue is the documentary record of one of the most thoroughly documented cases of Nazi persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses: the archive of the Kusserow family of Bad Lippspringe, in North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the Federal Court of Justice's (Bundesgerichtshof) account of the case, the material runs from the National Socialist takeover in 1933 to the arrest of Annemarie Kusserow on 25 October 1944.^[1]

The ruling revives a return claim brought by Jehovas Zeugen in Deutschland, the German association of Jehovah's Witnesses, and it raises the bar for the defendant — the Federal Republic of Germany, which had prevailed at two lower courts. The decision does not resolve who owns the archive, which stays in Dresden while the case is re-heard.

German legal outlets described the outcome as a Teilerfolg, a partial success, for the Witnesses.^[2][3][4] The organization's own news service framed it as the Federal Court of Justice "backing" Jehovah's Witnesses — a characterization by the litigant, not a description of the court's order.^[5] What the senate actually did was narrower: it found that the Cologne court had applied the wrong legal standard, quashed its dismissal of the claim, and sent the matter back for a new hearing.^[1]

The family behind the archive

The archive belonged to a family whose persecution is independently recorded outside any court file. Franz and Hilda Kusserow raised eleven children in Bad Lippspringe, a household of thirteen that became a center of Bible Student (Bibelforscher) activity in the 1930s. The Gestapo searched the home again and again — the US Holocaust Memorial Museum counts nearly 20 searches; the local Stolpersteine memorial project records 18, the first in April 1933.^[6][7]

Twelve of the thirteen family members were imprisoned in jails, concentration camps or, for the minors, Nazi children's homes, the Stolpersteine project records, tallying roughly 48 years of lost liberty across the family.^[7]

Two of the sons were executed. Wilhelm Kusserow was killed by a firing squad in Münster in April 1940, at 25, after refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht.^[6] Wolfgang Kusserow, arrested in December 1941 for the same refusal, was beheaded at Brandenburg-Görden prison on 28 March 1942, at about 20.^[7] Their mother, Hilda Kusserow, was held at the Ravensbrück concentration camp; a son, Karl-Heinz, survived imprisonment that included Dachau but died in 1946 of tuberculosis contracted in the camps, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.^[6]

Annemarie Kusserow, the eldest daughter, compiled and preserved the family's papers; she and her sister Waltraud later recorded an oral history now held by the Holocaust museum.^[6] Annemarie Kusserow died in 2005.^[1]

How the case reached Karlsruhe

The lawsuit that reached the Federal Court of Justice began at the Landgericht Bonn (Bonn Regional Court), which on 19 April 2024 (Az. 1 O 311/22) dismissed the Witnesses' claim for return of the archive. The Oberlandesgericht Köln affirmed that dismissal on 16 April 2025 (Az. 18 U 57/24), reasoning that the association had legitimized or tolerated the possession of the documents by the family member who held them. The Federal Court of Justice set that judgment aside on 26 June 2026.^[1]

The dispute turns on how the archive left the family's hands. By the Federal Court of Justice's account, one of Annemarie Kusserow's brothers sold the documents to the Federal Republic of Germany in 2009, following a 2008 request to borrow them; the material went to the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden.^[1]

The Witnesses contend that Annemarie Kusserow's will left the archive to their association and that the association is her legal heir — and therefore that the brother had no right to sell. That contention is not established. It is precisely what the remand orders the Cologne court to determine: whether she was the sole owner of the documents and whether the association inherited them.^[1]

The legal question: good faith and "lost" property

The remand centers on a familiar problem in German property law: whether a buyer can acquire good title to something the seller did not own.

Under § 932 of the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB), a purchaser can in principle acquire ownership in good faith even from a seller who is not the owner. But § 935 carves out an exception: no good-faith acquisition is possible for property that was abhandengekommen — lost from the owner's possession, for example by being taken without authorization. The plaintiff's possession position as a potential heir is governed by §§ 857 and 868 BGB.^[1]

The Cologne court had treated the association's toleration of the situation as curing any such loss. The Federal Court of Justice rejected that reasoning. The legal effects of an item's having been lost from possession, the senate held, end only when the owner regains actual possession of it — mere toleration of another's control does not restore it.^[1]

On that basis, the senate found, good-faith acquisition by the Federal Republic cannot be assumed on the findings made so far, and the return claim cannot be dismissed. The court's press release put the operative point this way:

In English: on this basis, the exclusionary effect of § 935(1), first sentence, BGB bars a good-faith acquisition of ownership in the documents by the defendant under § 932 BGB. In plain terms, if the archive was legally "lost" when it left the family, the state could not have bought clean title — and the Cologne court must now decide, on the corrected standard, whether that is what happened.

The parties' positions

For Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany, spokesman Sebastian Stock cast the ruling as vindication, saying it was established that the archive had been "unlawfully sold" to the museum.^[2] That is the organization's characterization, and it goes further than the court did: the Federal Court of Justice made no final finding that the sale was unlawful. It held that good faith cannot be assumed on the current record and remanded the question for decision.^[1]

The Federal Republic of Germany, as defendant, has argued that it acquired the archive in good faith under § 932 BGB — that it could reasonably treat the selling brother as entitled to sell — an argument that succeeded at both lower courts and that the Federal Court of Justice has now put back in doubt.^[1] A comment on the 26 June 2026 ruling from the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr or the federal government was not located in the sources reviewed for this article.

An earlier and sympathetic voice belongs to the family itself. In reporting from 2022, a surviving brother, Paul-Gerhard Kusserow, then in his 90s, objected to the archive's resting place, saying his brothers had died for refusing military service and that he did not find it right for the family legacy to be kept in a military museum.^[8]

What happens next

The archive remains in Dresden. The case returns to the Oberlandesgericht Köln, which must now decide, on the standard the Federal Court of Justice has set, whether Annemarie Kusserow owned the documents outright, whether the Witnesses' association inherited them, and whether the material was lost from the family's possession before it was sold to the state. Until it does, ownership of the paper record of the Kusserow family's persecution is, once again, an open question.