Provenance research at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin

The collections of Berlin Central and Regional Library (ZLB) contain books that were confiscated from their rightful owners during the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. This looted property – or more precisely “cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution” – includes not only items that were forcibly taken by the executive organs of the Third Reich or expropriated under discriminatory laws, but also those which the persecuted owners were forced to sell so as to be able to escape or survive.

Our task is to check the suspect holdings, identify the stolen books and determine their origin so as to be able to return them to their rightful owners or the latter’s heirs.

The often inconspicuous books are invaluable as bearers of the memory of those persecuted and the fate they suffered. They are usually the only mementos from the time prior to their persecution, serving as a reminder of their former lives or those of their murdered family members

In total, more than 200,000 suspect books in the ZLB holdings have to be checked. Each copy is searched on the shelf, and the provenance information contained inside it is then photographed and recorded in a database. A stamp, a signature, a small marginal note or a bookplate can provide a clue to the rightful owner, or to the realisation that the item is not looted property but the property of the ZLB. For a large proportion of the books that do not show any particular traces, it will not be possible to draw such definitive conclusions and they will be listed as suspicious accessions for the time being.

The names of thousands of people and organisations have been found in the books to date: all of them need to be identified and checked for Nazi persecution. Only then can the search for the current owners begin. The necessary archive research cannot be carried out by us alone, so we are making all the information on the books and their presumed owners available to the public and to other research projects.

The results of our research are documented on the ZLB’s Nazi-looted property page and in the provenance database Looted Cultural Assets. We also report our finds to the Lost Art database.

© Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin