In the third paragraph of your letter you speak of pieces having been appropriated by ‘purchase’, trickery or force.  [...] However, the research carried out by numerous colleagues over the last 50 years has clearly shown [...] that they remembered the German colonial period as a phase in which the colonial master attempted to rule with some rigour and determination, but attempted to achieve the greatest possible justice. [...]

From this perspective, we do not have too much reason to be ashamed of our role at that time. [...] 

[About a chair of the Karagwe-collection) 

[The chair] is not in our exhibition as an object of trade or as an object of value, but as a document of courtly life in this part of Africa, which is very difficult to depict due to the general poverty of this country with regard to the civilisational equipment of its groups. [...]

Many developing peoples today have completely unrealistic ideas about what values they have lost because there are some collections in Europe and America.

Certainly, there were also communities within Africa with a very rich and mature art - East Africa was never one of them. [...]

In the present case, the legal situation is absolutely clear, and with it the ownership situation. I don't know whether it makes sense to return individual pieces or small collections from the holdings of German museums to the legal successors of the former colonial territories in the form of a goodwill action, and it's not for me to decide, because I have to preserve the collections entrusted to me here, to expand them, to make them scientifically accessible and to present them to our public.

That is my duty as a museum man.