The role of official and publicly appointed auctioneers in Saxony and the Province of Saxony with regard to the utilization of property belonging to emigrants and deported Jewish citizens in the period 1933 to 1945

The project aimed to create a database for basic research on the confiscation of property through Nazi persecution in the Province of Saxony and in Anhalt. Building on this, a study was to be published on the role of the official and publicly appointed auctioneers in this process. On the basis of a systematic investigation of a total of 1,300 files from the foreign currency office, which were viewed page by page, and other relevant records from the Saxony-Anhalt state archive in Magdeburg for the period 1933–1945, a Microsoft Access database is being created as an internal archive research tool.
The focus of the data collection is on the property confiscated by the Nazi authorities from Jewish citizens in the Province of Saxony and Anhalt. For the provenance research, information on expropriated cultural goods such as paintings, prints and other art objects is particularly relevant. Also captured, however, are details of books, furniture, musical instruments, music scores, religious ritual implements, jewelry and everyday objects made of precious metals. The database also records information on “aryanized” companies, buildings and land, agricultural property, bank deposits, shareholdings of expropriated persons and handwritten evidence by the persons concerned (e.g. letters), which has been preserved in the files and may be of sentimental value to the heirs. The database also provides information on the individuals and institutions involved in the expropriation procedures (experts, bailiffs, auctioneers, freight companies, etc.). Working through the files and developing a scheme for recording the results of the research took place as part of the teaching module “Provenance research as a field of work for historians”, which was started in the 2013 winter semester in the history department at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Since the project began in November 2013, 40 students have been introduced to the basics of provenance research and included in the review of files on Nazi-confiscated cultural goods in the Saxony-Anhalt state archive.
The database created enables the archivists at the Saxony-Anhalt state archive to respond to inquiries in a precise and focused way without time-consuming file searches. These inquiries may come from victims and their descendants, provenance researchers and scientists who are dealing with the subject of the persecution of Jews as part of their basic research.

(c) Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Fakultät für Humanwissenschaften Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Neuzeit