Interview Tracing Stolen Books

15 January 2025

After the establishment of the Nazi regime, books forcibly removed from their owners ended up in the Heidelberg University Library. How did that happen?

Gildhoff: We know that the Heidelberg University Library took on books from confiscated stocks from 1934. The initiative generally came from state authorities. This was, above all, banned literature, for which the Prussian State Library in Berlin served as the central receiving and distributing institution. Furthermore, the University Library took delivery of books confiscated by the police responsible for the Heidelberg-Mannheim area or by local authorities. Nazi persecution also led to the confiscation of whole libraries belonging, for example, to trade unions and labor organizations. More and more books previously belonging to Jewish owners were added, initially from distress and forced sales, later also from expropriations. Typically, these books came into library holdings covertly through purchases from antiquarian bookstores. Finally, in Heidelberg there are also books stolen from Eastern European libraries during the Second World War.

What kind of books were they?

Gildhoff: Academic publications tended to play a subordinate role. The confiscated works included, in particular, those books that were on the Nazi ban lists and were consequently regarded as undesirable or blacklisted literature. That included modern fiction, pacifist and marxist publications or generally works by outlawed and persecuted authors during the Nazi period.

Does that mean that these works continued to be publicly available after being confiscated?

Gildhoff: That was not the case. There were explicit instructions that confiscated books were to be separated and, at most, made available to a limited group of users under certain conditions, for example if they were of special scientific interest. In addition, accompanying letters gave the order that “undesirable books” were to be discarded, that is, withdrawn from circulation. This instruction was not carried out, however, which led to the paradoxical situation that books were preserved from destruction during the transfer process. However, we should not see this as deliberate resistance by the library management in those days. Their intention was primarily to supplement and increase existing stocks.

How do you track down the stolen books in the University Library stocks?

Gildhoff: Many other libraries classify new books by their year of acquisition, which makes it easy to access the relevant holdings immediately; by contrast, we in Heidelberg are dealing with a classification system that up to 1962 was based on topic areas. That makes it hard to search as we don’t have direct access to the acquisition date of the holdings. What’s more, as of 1939 there are no longer any accounting records of purchases. So we mainly rely on the hand-written filing cards in the catalogue, which fortunately do indicate the acquisition date – if only the year. There are approximately 460,000 hand-written cards. They have been digitized by now, at least.

In this search, does every book from the relevant period need to be examined?

Gildhoff: No, that isn’t necessary. We examine the books where five years or more have elapsed between the publication year and the date of acquisition. That is because we assume that new publications were purchased regularly. In a further step, we look for signs of their provenance in the relevant books, such as indications of the owner or evidence of origin. We don’t have very high hit rates. Out of the books we’ve looked through so far – to give a rough idea – we can class about 450 of them in categories like “suspicious”, “probably loot” or “certainly loot”. That corresponds to around two or three percent of all acquisitions in that period.

How does the university deal with books that have been clearly identified as loot? Are they given back, for example to the heirs of the former owners?

Gildhoff: With this project we have committed ourselves to restitution – that was also a precondition for funding through the German Lost Art Foundation. As soon as we have completed the historical searches, we will move onto the complicated job of finding the heirs. We have already contacted two descendants of owners from the United States and the Netherlands. They both only asked for photos and had no wish for the books to be returned. That is naturally also related to the fact that most books are of no great value in a material sense, which makes this kind of loot different, for example, from precious artworks.

Is there also a public documentation of the books identified as Nazi loot, going beyond individual restitution?

Gildhoff: That is also an important part of this project. Independently of whether the books remain in the University Library or are returned to the heirs, they are in any case clearly marked. A note is made both in the physical copy and in the digital book catalogue that it was identified as loot in the context of the Heidelberg project. In addition, in both scenarios the name of the original owner is documented. Another thing is that book signs or notes relevant for identification – for instance, an ex libris – are digitized and made available online worldwide via the databases “Looted Cultural Assets” and “Lost Art”. This also offers an opportunity for former owners or descendants to contact us on their own initiative. In that way, the project contributes to working through the history of expropriation and persecution in the Nazi period not only at the local level but also in a broader context.