Provenance research at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin

The holdings of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZLB) contain books that were confiscated from their rightful owners during the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. This Nazi loot, more specifically known as “cultural goods confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution” includes not only objects that were forcibly stolen by the executive bodies of the Third Reich or expropriated through discriminatory laws, but also those that had to be sold by persecuted citizens to enable their escape or survival.
Our task is to examine the suspect stocks, identify the stolen books and determine their origin so that these objects can be returned to the rightful owners or their heirs.
These often nondescript books serve as reminders of persecuted citizens and their fate and, as such, the value of them is priceless. They are usually the only mementos from the time before persecution, evoking memories of a person’s own past life or that of their murdered family members.
In total, more than 200,000 suspicious books in the ZLB holdings need to be examined. Each copy is sought out on the shelf and the provenance features found in it are photographed and entered into a database. A stamp, a signature, a tiny note in the margin or a bookplate may be enough to identify the rightful owner or to establish that the book is not a looted object, but property of the ZLB. For a large proportion of the books which have no particular distinctive features, it may not be possible to make any conclusive statements and these will be recorded as suspect acquisitions for the time being.
To date, it has been possible to find the names of thousands of people and corporate bodies in the books, and all need to be identified and checked in regard to Nazi persecution. Only then can the search begin for the present-day owners. It is not possible for us to carry out the archival research necessary for this on our own and therefore all the information on the books and the presumed owners is made available to the public and to other research projects.
The results of our research are documented on the site Nazi loot at the ZLB and in the Looted Cultural Assets provenance database. We also register our found objects in the Lost Art Database.

(c) Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin