Investigation and restitution of Nazi-looted property in Lower Saxony’s Göttingen State and University Library

In addition to works of art, books were also looted on a large scale during the Third Reich as a result of confiscations from banned and dissolved organisations as well as the expropriation of emigrants and deported Jewish citizens by organs of the NSDAP and the state (looted literature). Added to this was the theft of “looted” books in the territories occupied during the Second World War. While a large share of these looted books were either deliberately destroyed or lost in the turmoil of war, some of them are still to be found in the collections of academic libraries today.

Research project

Research has increasingly focused on this important topic for some years now. In connection with the exhibition Und euch zum Trotz [And in defiance of you] on the burning of books in 1933, which was shown at the Old Town Hall in May 2008, Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) took the opportunity to take a closer look at initial indications of the incorporation of looted and plundered items in its holdings under National Socialism. With financial support from the Presidential Board of the University of Göttingen, it developed a concept for a comprehensive and systematic research project on the identification and restitution of illegally acquired literature during the National Socialist era by conducting a nine-month preliminary project (1 September 2008 – 31 May 2009) based on initial work done previously.

The research project itself involving scholars and librarians at SUB Göttingen was carried out from 1 June 2009 to 31 August 2011. The Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzrecherche/-forschung (AfP – Bureau for Provenance Research) at the Institute for Museum Research of the National Museums in Berlin – the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation funded the project with around EUR 60,000 from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. SUB Göttingen contributed an equal amount of funding.

Project tasks, work stages and documentation of outcomes

The preliminary project involved checking all of the library’s surviving accession registers from 1933 to 1950 and the information they contain on acquired titles, their place and year of publication, their accession number, the date they were received and the type and source of their respective acquisition; the aim here was to obtain an initial overview of the extent of suspicious acquisitions. A total of around 100,000 entries were checked, of which 8,221 were categorised as suspicious and recorded in a database.

The research project itself was dedicated to an investigation of all suspected cases in more detail. In addition to identifying possible references to previous owners in the books themselves (ownership stamps, gift bookplates, names, dedications, etc.), extensive research had to be carried out in various archives in order to obtain more precise information about the respective type and circumstances of the acquisition. All books finally identified as looted or stolen property were marked as such in the Göttingen University Catalogue (GUK). In addition, the suspected cases whose procurement circumstances could not be precisely determined were likewise labelled in this catalogue. The catalogue entries are accompanied by explanatory notes and information on the acquisition history of the respective titles based on archival studies. All proven and suspected cases of looted property were also entered in the Lost Art online database. At the same time, research was carried out into possible previous owners or their heirs so that they could be offered the return of the illegally acquired books.

The historical background, working methods and results of the research project were presented to the general public at the exhibition Bücher unter Verdacht – NS-Raub- und Beutegut an der SUB Göttingen [Books under suspicion – Nazi looted and looted property at SUB Göttingen] from 13 May 2011 to 10 July 2011 in the foyer of the Central Library of SUB Göttingen, with the support of the university association Universitätsbund Göttingen e. V. The exhibition is documented in a catalogue of the same name.

Examples

In the Third Reich, academic libraries (not public libraries) were the only libraries that were allowed to collect and store banned literature, subject to strict conditions of use. From 1933 onwards, Göttingen University Library incorporated in its collections works of “forbidden literature” that had been confiscated from dissolved organisations, sometimes also from politically or religiously persecuted individuals. From 1938, it also received numerous book consignments from the Prussian State Library in Berlin, which performed a distributor function within the German library system from 1934 onwards: the authorities drew up lists of confiscated books and sent them to the Prussian State Library in Berlin; the latter then made a selection for its own holdings and ensured that the remaining titles were distributed to the other academic libraries.

From the beginning of the Second World War in particular, items delivered from the occupied territories were increasingly added via the Notgemeinschaft (Emergency Association of German Science), the Reichstauschstelle (Reich Exchange Agency), and the Procurement Office of the German libraries, which supplied German academic libraries with academic literature from abroad. In June 1943, for example, the Procurement Office sent some 140 books to Göttingen that bore the stamps of prisoner-of-war camps or details of the reasons why the title in question had been censored or segregated.

Of the above-mentioned 8,221 suspected cases in the SUB Göttingen depots, all of which were subjected to physical inspection, 1,081 books were found to be clear or suspected cases of looting. Among these are around 180 books from Harburg-Wilhelmsburg public library that were banned under National Socialism, and which the library endeavoured in vain to have returned to it after 1945. In addition, it was possible to prove in 125 cases that confiscated works from SPD and trade union libraries were sent to Göttingen via local mayors. Furthermore, 32 books bearing the stamps of various trade union and workers’ associations were found which found their way to the library via the Nazi unified trade union “German Labour Front”. Finally, the SPD politician Dr. Heinrich Troeger donated 72 books with Marxist content to Göttingen University Library in 1934 in order to escape political persecution. The family were informed of the find by SUB Göttingen and according to their wishes, SUB Göttingen handed over these books to the foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, where Troeger’s estate is held. There were very few cases in which it was possible to identify books that had previously been owned by Jewish citizens: only two cases were found in which so-called “non-Aryans” offered books for sale to Göttingen University Library. According to the wishes of their relatives, these books are to remain in the holdings of SUB Göttingen.

© Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen