Nazi-confiscated property after 1945: the role of the Zentralstelle für wissenschaftliche Altbestände (ZwA)

The research project, which received funding for two years from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, builds on the content of the completed project “Creating transparency” to detect Nazi-confiscated property in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. At the same time, it is intended to conduct basic research comparable to the project study on the Reich Exchange Office and Preußischer Staatsbibliothek.

The project aims to investigate where Nazi-confiscated property went after 1945. After the Second World War, vast quantities of old stocks and books regarded as ownerless—which were often located in collection points and libraries where they were only provisionally secured—were moved. German libraries had suffered heavy losses during the war and this was a crucial factor in the decision to now make extensive use of these books and distribute them widely in order to fill gaps in libraries’ stocks.

In the German Democratic Republic, a non-commercial central office was established in 1953 which—in addition to duplicates supplied from academic libraries—derived a proportion of its stocks from non-inventoried books which came from various libraries in the GDR. The collections handed over to the Zentralstelle für wissenschaftliche Altbestände (Central Office for Old Academic Collections, ZwA) also contained looted property which the National Socialists had incorporated into their institutions and which had been secured and distributed after 1945, mixed with other “unused” historic stocks. Added to this were collections that had been expropriated as part of land reform measures or confiscated after their owners defected to the West, as well as collections that had been freed up after various administrative reforms. From 1959 until it was eventually dissolved in 1995, the ZwA was located at the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek/Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin as an independent department.

In the project, all the preserved ZwA files and other relevant files, e.g. from the acquisition department of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, are being compiled and analyzed. In addition, other relevant archival holdings—in the Federal Archives and in various other state archives—are being consulted for the purpose of reconstructing the history of the ZwA.

A further work package includes the targeted evaluation of the ZwA’s former service catalog (“Katalog der vermittelten Bestände”). In this way, the amount and whereabouts of Nazi-looted property distributed after 1945 will be researched and, where possible, the origin of the books being investigated will be explored. As a number of Berlin libraries were among the main recipients of items from the ZwA—after the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek (the number one recipient with approx. 25% overall), the Humboldt-Universität university library, the Staatliche Museen library, the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte, the Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus at the Central Committee of the SED and the library of the Jewish Community—the further examination of the holdings procured will be focused on the books preserved in Berlin libraries. The substantiated cases of Nazi-looted property in the holdings of the Staatsbibliothek are being promptly and comprehensively documented in the online catalog, as in the “Creating transparency” project.

The results achieved will be summarized and published at the end of the project.

(c) Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin