Basic principles
Provenance research (from the Latin verb “provenire”, to originate) focuses on the origins and history of cultural artefacts. Here special attention is paid to identifying items looted by the Nazis.
Nazi loot or Nazi-confiscated cultural artefacts are objects that were stolen or confiscated from their rightful owners during the Nazi era as the result of racial, political, religious or ideological persecution. Along with objects confiscated by the Nazi authorities, this category also encompasses items which their owners were forced to sell at less than their value, for example to finance their flight abroad.
The foundation for research into Nazi loot was laid by a declaration. made in December 1998 at the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. By signing it, the Federal Republic of Germany pledged to identify Nazi loot and find a just and fair solution with its former owners or their heirs. In December 1999, the federal government, the Laender and the national associations of local authorities issued a common statement relating to the discovery and restitution of Nazi-confiscated cultural assets in fulfilment of this pledge.
In recent years, the German National Library has carried out a number of projects involving research into items looted by the Nazis. One of these projects focused on the book collection and distribution centre (Bücherverwertungsstelle) in Vienna. This centre was established in 1938 for the purpose of redistributing books confiscated from Jewish publishing companies, bookshops and private libraries. It was supervised by Albert Paust, a librarian who worked at the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig. In 1938/39, he had around 500 volumes transferred from the book collection and distribution centre to the Deutsche Bücherei. These volumes were identified and entered into the Lost Art Database as found objects. During the provenance research project that took place between 2018 and 2020, serial titles and publications series that were not recorded as mandatory deposit copies were inspected on the shelves in order to identify Nazi loot.
The reserarch carried out by historian Sören Flachowsky on the history of the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig during the Nazi era has confirmed that the Deutsche Bücherei was already trying to close gaps in its collection by cooperating with the Nazi authorities in 1933. It also seems likely that the Deutsche Bücherei integrated so-called “redistributed loot” into its collection after 1945. This refers to cultural assets which were redistributed several times – e.g. to Nazi organisations, second-hand bookshops or private individuals – after they were confiscated and were therefore only added to public collections after the end of the Nazi era.
In 2019, the German National Library – sponsored by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media – appointed a provenance research expert to pursue this essential research systematically.
Procedure
For the majority of the Deutsche Bücherei’s holdings, the search for Nazi loot begins in the accession books. For most of the works which were not directly deposited at the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig in fulfilment of the publishers’ deposit obligation, the accession books contain annotations indicating their origin. If these annotations indicate that the item could be Nazi loot, e.g. because it was deposited by a Nazi organisation, police department or financial authority, it is then subjected to an autopsy, i.e. it is inspected at the shelves.
During the autopsy, we examine whether the work contains provenance indicators such as handwritten names, bookplates or stamps inserted by previous owners. These indicators are photographed and recorded in the database.
The characteristics that indicate the possible previous owners of the work form the basis of the actual historical research, the aim of which is to find out whether the owners were persecuted on racist, political, religious or ideological grounds during the Nazi era. Historic registration files and address books, files preserved from police departments or financial authorities, and databases, including the database of Holocaust victims maintained by the memorial institution Yad Vashem, can help reconstruct the fate of these individuals.
If this research confirms that a work was looted by the Nazis, we search for the heirs of the former owners in order to establish contact with them and initiate the restitution procedure.
Resolved cases
In the following overwiev we document completed restitutions and other agreements reached in the spirit of the Washington Principles.
Baerwald, Emil and Jenny
Emil Baerwald was born on 5 February 1869 in Frankfurt am Main; his father Herman Baerwald (1828-1907) was the director of the Philanthropin, a Jewish private school. In 1891, Emil Baerwald went to New York, where he worked as a merchant and married Jenny Dreyfus from Basel (born on 28 March 1880) in 1906. In 1925, the couple moved to Berlin but continued travelling regularly to the USA. Because of the increased persecution they experienced under the Nazi regime, Emil and Jenny Baerwald decided to return to the USA. While Jenny Baerwald was an American citizen and therefore able to travel more freely, Emil Baerwald, as a German citizen, had to apply for a U.S. visa, which he obtained through contacts at the American consulate in Berlin. He travelled to the USA in August 1938, returning to Europe once more in the autumn of that same year but without entering Germany. In the autumn of 1938, Jenny Baerwald spent a brief time in Berlin tying up their affairs in the city before the couple finally emigrated to New York at the beginning of March 1939. Emil Baerwald became an American citizen in 1944 and died in New York City in 1948; Jenny Baerwald died in 1965.
Emil and Jenny Baerwald’s bookplate was used to identify one of the books from the couple’s former private library, which was found in the collection held by the German Museum of Books and Writing. The book was purchased for the German Museum of Books and Writing in 1956 through Deutsche Buchexport GmbH at an auction held by antiquarian book dealer Gerd Rosen in West Berlin. It is not known who put the book up for auction. It was presumably confiscated after the Baerwalds emigrated and found its way into Berlin’s book trade at an unknown later date. This hypothesis is supported by a comparable copy from the same library, which was identified at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin and returned to its rightful owners in 2018.
Thanks to close communication with provenance researchers at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, the German National Library was able to contact the Baerwalds’ legal successors and return the book in the summer of 2022. Before doing so, we were permitted to prepare a digitised version so that the book will still be accessible to the public in digital format.
Further information:
Bermann Fischer, Gottfried
Photo: DNB, Laura Stein
Gottfried Bermann was born in Gleiwitz (Gliwice, Upper Silesia) on 31 March 1897. He studied medicine and subsequently started his career as an assistant doctor. In 1925, he married Brigitte Fischer (born in Berlin on 5 April 1905), the daughter of Berlin publisher Samuel Fischer. At his father-in-law's request, he joined the publishing company and changed his name to Gottfried Bermann Fischer. After Samuel Fischer's death in 1934, Gottfried Bermann Fischer and his wife took over the publishing company.
Gottfried and Brigitte Bermann Fischer were both of Jewish origin. In 1935, they moved to Vienna to escape persecution by the Nazis. When they left, Gottfried Bermann Fischer succeeded in reaching an agreement with the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda regarding the division of the S. Fischer Verlag: while one part of the publishing company remained in the German Reich under the management of Peter Suhrkamp, Bermann Fischer was able to re-establish the other part in Vienna under the name "Bermann-Fischer Verlags GmbH".
In March 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, Bermann Fischer and his family fled via Switzerland to Sweden, where he set up the Bermann-Fischer-Verlag once more. He was forced to leave his personal possessions and the Viennese company's book depository behind when he escaped from Austria. In 1940, he was expelled from Sweden following an arrest and emigrated to the USA with his family. After the end of the war, he re-established the publishing company S. Fischer-Verlag in Berlin and Frankfurt and oversaw its operations until 1962. He died in Italy in 1995.
20 publications that formerly belonged to Gottfried Bermann Fischer have been identified from among the German National Library's holdings in Leipzig. The majority of these writings came to the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig in 1938/39 via the book collection and distribution centre (Bücherverwertungsstelle) in Vienna. Albert Paust, who had been seconded from the Deutsche Bücherei to the book collection and distribution centre (Bücherverwertungsstelle) in September 1938, appears to have personally supervised the removal of Bermann Fischer's private library from his apartment in Vienna's Hietzing district. In a report to the Deutsche Bücherei's Director-General, Heinrich Uhlendahl, he expressly mentions the rare private prints that he had found in Bermann Fischer's library. However, the Deutsche Bücherei was not the sole recipient of the confiscated property: the Austrian National Library in Vienna also added books belonging to Gottfried Bermann Fischer to its inventory. After the war, more books were found in the so-called "Tanzenberg collection", a depository of books looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. The fact that books from the private library also found their way into the antiquarian book trade is evidenced not least by the finding that two of the publications identified at the German National Library were not acquired through the book collection and distribution centre (Bücherverwertungsstelle) but were rather added to the collection as antiquarian purchases made as late as the 1960s.
The German National Library managed to contact Gottfried Bermann Fischer's heirs and, in the spring of 2023, reached an agreement with them regarding the return of the publications and their subsequent repurchase. The 20 books can thus remain in the German National Library's collection and – in accordance with the heirs' wishes – continue to be accessible to the public.
Further information:
Gottfried Bermann Fischer, Bedroht – Bewahrt. Der Weg eines Verlegers, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1994.
Sören Flachowsky, „Zeughaus für die Schwerter des Geistes“. Die Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig 1912-1945, Göttingen 2018.
Murray G. Hall und Christina Köstner, „…allerlei für die Nationalbibliothek zu ergattern…“ Eine österreichische Institution in der NS-Zeit, Wien: Böhlau 2006.
Irene Nawrocka, „Verlagssitz: Wien, Stockholm, New York, Amsterdam. Der Bermann-Fischer Verlag im Exil (1933-1950). Ein Abschnitt aus der Geschichte des S. Fischer Verlages“, in: Archiv für die Geschichte des Buchwesens 53 (2000), S. 1-210.
Irene Nawrocka (Hrsg.), Carl Zuckmayer – Gottfried Bermann Fischer: Briefwechsel. Mit den Briefen von Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer und Brigitte Bermann Fischer, Göttingen 2004.
Grit Nitzsche, „Die Bücherverwertungsstelle Wien“, in: Regine Dehnel (Hg.), Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut. Zweites Hannoversches Symposium, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 67-72.
Glanz, Heinrich
Heinrich Glanz was born in Vienna on 13 August 1891, one of the five children of the Jewish couple David and Regine Glanz, née Graeber, who originally came from Galicia. He studied law and married Selma Leitner (born on 10 October 1893), a teacher of English and French, in June 1916. He taught at Jewish schools and worked as a representative for the Jewish publishing company “Menorah” for a while. Beginning in 1923, he attempted to establish his own bookshop and publishing company, but due to his lack of training as a bookseller, he was not granted the required licence to establish a book trading and publishing business specialising in Judaica and Hebraica until 1927.
Immediately after the annexation of Austria, Heinrich Glanz was forced to close his publishing company on Gestapo orders. The publisher’s warehouse was probably cleared by the Gestapo and its contents handed over to the “Bücherverwertungsstelle” (book collection and distribution centre) in Vienna in September 1938. This authority was established by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda in Vienna to collect books confiscated from book dealers, publishing companies and private libraries and redistribute them to libraries in the German Reich.
Heinrich and Selma Glanz presumably emigrated to London in November 1938. After their arrival, Heinrich Glanz resumed his work as a book dealer and publisher, for which he may have been able to draw on publishing stocks which had been stored in Switzerland and the Netherlands and thus escaped confiscation. At the end of May 1940, they travelled by sea via Canada to the USA, where they settled in New York City. Here too, Heinrich Glanz worked as a book dealer until he was forced to give up his work on health grounds. He died in New York City in September 1958. During the 1960s, Selma Glanz, who initially worked at New York University as a French teacher, took the post of Assistant Professor at the private Jewish Yeshiva University in New York City. She died in April 1985.
A book in the holdings of the German National Library in Leipzig was identified as the former property of Heinrich Glanz due to the dedication to Heinrich Glanz written by the author on the title page. According to the Deutsche Bücherei's accession book, the item was sent to the library by the “Bücherverwertungsstelle” (book collection and distribution centre) in Vienna and was added to the collection in September 1939.
The Holocaust Claims Processing Office helped the German National Library identify the rightful heirs and established contact with the community of heirs. This enabled us to return the book to Heinrich Glanz's heirs in June 2024. They allowed us to prepare a digitised version of the book before it was returned; this can now be accessed by the public through the library catalogue.
Further information:
Rosenfeld, Valentin Victor
Valentin Victor Rosenfeld was born on 2 March 1886 in Vienna and was a lawyer by profession. He also volunteered for the swimming section of the Jewish sports club Hakoah Vienna. During the 1920s, his wife Eva Rosenfeld established a progressive private school, the Hietzing-Schule, in cooperation with Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlington. After the couple separated, Eva Rosenfeld and their son Victor initially moved to Berlin, where she trained as a psychotherapist. In 1936, they emigrated to Great Britain.
Following the annexation of Austria in March 1938, Valentin Rosenfeld also fled to Great Britain, from where he helped numerous members of Hakoah Vienna to emigrate. The property he left in Vienna was confiscated by the Nazis, who then assigned part of his library to the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) in Vienna. Rosenfeld’s collection of Goethe autographs was first sent to the Zentraldepot für beschlagnahmte Sammlungen (Central Depot for Confiscated Collections) then handed over to the ÖNB’s manuscript department. Other parts of his library were spread far and wide by the “Bücherverwertungsstelle” (book collection and distribution centre) in Vienna, an authority set up by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda to distribute books confiscated from Jewish book shops, publishing companies and private libraries.
Three works belonging to Valentin Rosenfeld have been found in the collection of the German National Library in Leipzig, all of which found their way into the collection of the Deutsche Bücherei in January 1939 through the Bücherverwertungsstelle (book collection and distribution centre) in Vienna. Two of the volumes contain Valentin Rosenfeld’s bookplate, while the third – a kind of school magazine from the Hietzing-Schule, a progressive school founded by Eva Rosenfeld, contains a handwritten note with the first name of their son, Victor Rosenfeld. Thanks to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna), it has been possible to establish contact with the family's heirs. The works were returned to the heirs in June 2021.
Further information:
Murray G. Hall und Christina Köstner, „…allerlei für die Nationalbibliothek zu ergattern…“ Eine österreichische Institution in der NS-Zeit, Wien 2006.
Eintrag „Valentin Rosenfeld“, in: Markus G. Patka und Ignaz Hermann Körner (Hrsg.), Lexikon jüdischer Sportler in Wien 1900-1938 (Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung "100 Jahre Hoppauf Hakoah" des Jüdischen Museums der Stadt Wien vom 4. Juni bis 7. September 2008), Wien 2008, S. 179-180.
Karen Propp, „The Danube Maidens: Hakoah Vienna Girls‘ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s“, in: Susanne Helene Betz, Monika Löscher und Pia Schölnberger (Hrsg.), „..mehr als ein Sportverein“. 100 Jahre Hakoah Wien 1909-2009, Innsbruck, Wien u.a. 2009, S. 81-93, hier S. 85-86.
Information about the estate of Eva Rosenfeld in the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna: https://www.freud-museum.at/de/archiv (last retrieved on 23 June 2021)
Eintrag „Valentin Rosenfeld“, in: Wien Geschichte Wiki, zuletzt aktualisiert am 18. März 2021, URL: https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Valentin_Rosenfeld (last retrieved on 23 June 2021).
Monika Löscher, „Valentin Viktor Rosenfeld“, in: Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung, veröffentlicht am 11. Oktober 2021, URL: https://www.lexikon-provenienzforschung.org/rosenfeld-valentin-viktor (last retrieved on 02.06.2023).
Project: “Das Zentralantiquariat der DDR” (The Central Antiquarian Bookstore of the GDR)
In the late autumn of 2022, the Berlin State Library (SBB-PK) launched a project in partnership with the German Lost Art Foundation: "Das Zentralantiquariat der DDR (The Central Antiquarian Bookstore of the GDR). The German National Library is cooperating with the Berlin State Library on this project.
More about the project
Cooperation and networking
The systematic confiscation and exploitation of movable assets by the Nazi regime means that expropriated collections are now often scattered far and wide among numerous very different cultural institutions. Cooperative working methods and networking between provenance researchers for the purpose of exchanging data, experiences and research findings is therefore all the more important, particularly to avoid researching the same object more than once.
The German National Library has accordingly joined the “Looted Cultural Assets” cooperative, a network consisting of ten libraries in Germany and Israel which are working together to research and return books expropriated as a result of Nazi persecution. The joint database allows the provenance researchers in the cooperative to pool their knowledge, share it between their libraries and work together to investigate cases of suspected looting. The results of their research are also made available to the public where possible.
Moreover, the staff at the German National Library are represented in a number of networks:
- Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V.
This association for provenance research brings together more than 400 scientists and experts from all over the world who are dedicated to researching the origins of cultural assets at museums, libraries, archives, universities and the art trade. Its members meet once a year at their annual conference and form working groups to issue practical guidelines on performing, documenting and disseminating provenance research.
- Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung und Restitution – Bibliotheken (Working Group for Provenance Research and Restitution – Libraries)
Founded in 2014, this working group consists of provenance researchers active in the library sector. It meets twice a year to exchange experiences and develop proposals for addressing librarians’ concerns in connection with research into Nazi loot. In May 2017, the dbv-Kommission „Provenienzforschung und Provenienzerschließung (dbv commission on “provenance research and provenance cataloguing”) assumed the function of an office for the working group.
- Arbeitsgemeinschaft Provenienzforschung in Sachsen (Working group for provenance research in Saxony)
This working group is an informal network of provenance researchers who work at various cultural institutions in Saxony. They meet twice a year for expert dialogue at working level and are committing to anchoring provenance research more deeply at institutions in Saxony.
The following databases may also be useful when researching items looted by the Nazis:
Contact
provenienz@dnb.de
