He attended the University of Freiburg, majoring in art history, and joined his mother in 1932 at the Kaethe Perls Gallery in Paris.
[1] He and Army intelligence officer Martin Dannenberg were directed by an informant to a bank vault in Eichstätt, Bavaria, where they discovered an original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws signed by Adolf Hitler.
[2] Dannenberg recounted that Perls had tears in his eyes when he realized the enormity of their find and the fact that it was two Jews who had made the discovery.
First put on public display at the Skirball Cultural Center in 1999, the document was donated to the United States National Archives in 2010.
[7] The Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation case has been litigated for nearly two decades, most recently in the United States Supreme Court.