Nazi-looted property in the Berlin Academy Library—systematic research on monograph acquisitions up to 1956 and on the National Socialist special stock

The aim of the project “Nazi-looted property in the Berlin Academy Library—systematic research on monograph acquisitions up to 1956 and on the National Socialist special stock” was to systematically examine selected parts of the holdings of the Academy’s library for books confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution. It also aimed to publicly document the research findings with a view to restitution at a later date. Under third-party funding arrangements, Sandra Butte was the researcher and Katy Barthel the qualified librarian for the project. Dr. Stefan Wiederkehr managed the project.

In the course of the project, the initial hypothesis was confirmed: that books confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution—especially secondary looted goods—had found their way into the holdings of the Academy’s library. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, while the Academy was close to the regime, the library had only a minimal acquisition budget during the Nazi era and relied on opportunities to acquire books for free in order to expand its holdings. Secondly, the holdings of the Academy’s library grew at an unprecedented rate from 1950 onward in the wake of the Sovietization of the Academy. As part of this expansion, Nazi-looted property was also acquired from various sources and incorporated into the holdings, as the surviving accession journals show.

In addition to the regular holdings, there is also the “Nazi inventory”, which must be classified as suspicious overall. It consists of a self-contained special stock of approx. 12,000 volumes. Leading figures in the GDR era thought it “necessary to keep it under lock and key at all times because it mainly comprises fascist and militaristic literature”. The Academy Library took over the Nazi inventory in 1993 from predecessor institutions, who had obtained it from the Book Recovery Office that operated from 1945 to 1946. The vast majority of the volumes have ownership markings of previous owners and it is these that form the basis for the provenance research.

In the course of the project, 3,360 acquisitions that had been assessed as suspicious based on the accession journals or the files were examined in the depot and systematically reviewed for traces of provenance. Some 2,395 of these acquisitions were strongly suspected of being looted property. 31 acquisitions were clearly cultural goods confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution.

The suspect acquisitions that contain provenance traces were indexed according to the Weimar recommendations on provenance indexing in the Common Library Network (GBV) and thus made transparent for a public audience. They can be searched in the Academy Library’s OPAC (http://vzopc4.gbv.de/DB=38/) using the search term “Nazi-looted property”. In addition, in conjunction with Magdeburg Coordination Office, arrangements were made to automatically transfer the volumes labeled as suspicious in the Academy Library’s OPAC to the Lost Art Database and regularly update the evidence.

The results in numbers:

Number of examined acquisitions sorted by type of object: 15448 (100 %)

Number of acquisitions with clearly suspicious provenance: 31 (0,2 %)

Number of acquisitions with clearly unsuspicious provenance: 11056 (71,6 %)

Number of acquisitions with unclear provenance/gaps in provenance(1): 4361 (28,2 %) 

Number of restitution proceedings (2): : 0 (0 %)

Number of acquisitions registered in Lost Art Database(3): 1223 (7,9 %)

1 This also includes all acquisitions for which—based on the accession journals and/or traces of provenance found in the thorough examination—there is a suspicion of looted property, but this could not yet be fully confirmed.

2 From the start the restitution was not planned as part of the project during the 12-month period requested in 2011; it will take place within another framework.

3 Date: August 9, 2013.

(c) Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften