Ermittlungen von NS-Raubgut in den Zugängen der Jahre 1933-1945 der Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

As early as 1933, Heidelberg University Library (UB) was one of the largest university libraries in Germany with over one million volumes. By 1943, this stock had grown to about 1.2 million titles. Thanks to timely removal from storage, most of the books were saved from war damage.

During the "Third Reich", the UB also demonstrably took over books from confiscated property. In addition, books were acquired in occupied foreign countries during the war. Some suspicious facts indicate that the UB did not declare or only incompletely declared its corresponding acquisitions after the war, when the American military government approached it with corresponding restitution demands. The systematic examination of the accessions from 1933 to 1945, which has not yet been carried out, is now to be completed in the course of the funded project.

The research is complicated on the one hand by the fact that there is no comprehensive access catalogue. The accession books, which have only been preserved until 1938, only record the "regular" acquisitions, i.e. those that were purchased. Books that came to the UB through exchange or as gifts were not included. In addition, the acquisitions of the UB up to 1962 were not listed by year of acquisition, but by subject group. A complete overview of all acquisitions is only provided by the handwritten index cards, on which the year of acquisition or, in the case of exchanged or donated titles, the exact cataloguing date is noted. The focus of the project is therefore on the systematic examination of these older index cards. All antiquarian titles are to be identified, especially books that were presumed to belong to the "forbidden literature" due to their author or content, as well as foreign-language titles that entered the UB during the war.

All books classified as suspicious in this way are to be listed, checked by autopsy for older indications of ownership and, if necessary, documented in order to finally be able to determine possible previous owners and their heirs in further research.

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