Initial Inventory Check NS-looted Books for Public Libraries
Project funded under Project ID LA03-I2021 by 
Period: 15.01.2022-14.01.2024
Principal Investigators: German Library Association, Commission for Provenance Research and Indexing Michaela Scheibe & Berlin School of Library and Information Science (IBI), Prof. Dr. Vivien Petras
Project Research Staff: Norman Köhler
Latest News
18.01.2022
Norman Köhler began work on the project for the first time on Jan. 17, 2022. After an onboarding period, the historical holdings of the Christian Weise Library Zittau will be the first to undergo an initial check for Nazi-looted property. The project receives active support from the cooperation with the Department of Historical Holdings | Provenance Research | Coordination Office for Nazi-looted Property of the State Office for Libraries of Saxony.
16.12.2021
Due to the difficult situation still related to the pandemic, the project will now start on Jan. 15, 2022. Provenance researcher Norman Köhler has been recruited to handle the project and will start work on Jan. 15, 2022. Norman Köhler has many years of practical experience, e. g. from relevant projects at the SLUB Dresden (State and University Library), and was most recently involved in the Kiel-based provenance research project on the holdings of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
29.05.2021
The German Lost Art Foundation approved the two-year project application in April 2021. Due to the current difficult situation caused by the pandemic and the necessary job advertisement for the scientific project employee, the project is scheduled to start on November 1.
Project Description
The project aims to carry out initial checks in a representative selection of public libraries throughout Germany in order to develop a well-founded assessment of potential Nazi-looted property in these holdings, which have hardly been examined yet. This is intended to create a reliable basis for advancing provenance research in this area in a targeted manner. The project plan foresees initial checks in public libraries with historic holdings of different size and orientation from eight federal states. Collections ranging from a few hundred (Kreisfahrbücherei Celle) to over a hundred thousand volumes (Stadt- und Landesbibliothek Dortmund) will be taken into account. The origin of the holdings is often unknown, but in half of the cases, initial suspicions for Nazi-looted books have been raised.
This wide-ranging inventory check can only succeed if the public libraries themselves incur hardly any expense. For this reason, a provenance researcher is to visit 15 libraries for approximately one week each, examine the historic holdings and - if available and accessible - the acquisition documents on site, carry out further research before and after the visit, and summarize the respective results in standardized dossiers, especially with regard to future research needs. With this project structure, an appropriate procedure for the initial check for this target group can be offered and, at the same time, comparable assessments can be achieved through the checking routine of the same project researcher. The institutions themselves will only support the project with staff in the preparation and follow-up work and, above all, in the monitoring of the individual library visits.
Participating Libraries
Baden-Württemberg
| Reutlingen | City Library of Reutlingen | approx. 4,000 volumes (published before 1945) |
| Singen | Hegau-Library Singen | approx. 100,000 volumes, a. o. 1933-1945 published belles-lettres (gifted acquisitions) |
| Ulm | Central Library Ulm | approx. 1,000 to 1,500 volumes (published before 1945, accrual until 1955) |
Bavaria
| Hof | City Library Hof | approx. 1,300 volumes (published before 1945) |
| Munich | Munich Public Library | more than 190,000 volumes (published before 1945) |
| Nuremberg | Nürnberg City Library | approx. 34,000 volumes (accrual 1933-1945) |
Lower Saxony
| Celle/Eschede | Mobile Library of the County of Celle | approx. 500 volumes (published before 1945, from the dissolved Kreisbücherei Celle) |
North Rhine-Westphalia
| Aachen | Aachen City Library | approx. 110,000 volumes (published before 1945) |
| Altena | City Library Altena | approx. 500 volumes (published before 1945) |
| Dortmund | Dortmund City and State Library | approx. 80,000 volumes (acquired until 1949 and preserved until today; 1942 still 320,000 volumes, wartime losses traceable via access logs) |
| Cologne | Germania Judaica, Cologne Library for the History of German Jewry e.V. | approx. 5,000 volumes (published before 1945) |
Rhineland-Palatinate
| Trier | Scientific Library of the City of Trier | approx. 15,000 volumes (11,790 acquisitions 1933-1945, in addition yearly 10-20 antiquarian purchases after 1945) |
Saxony
| Zittau | Christian Weise Library Zittau / in cooperation with: State Office for Libraries of Saxony, Department of Historical Holdings | Provenance Research | Coordination Office for Nazi-looted Property (Chemnitz) | approx. 60,900 volumes (published before 1945) |
Schleswig-Holstein
| Lübeck | Library of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck | approx. 10,000 volumes (published before 1945) |
Thuringia
| Erfurt | City and Regional Library Erfurt | more than 17,000 volumes (acquired 1933-1945, in addition acquisitions after 1945) |