Restitution to the heirs of Benny Mielziner

A volume from the private library of Benny (Benjamin Jaakov) Mielziner (1853 – 1926), former head of the Jewish community in Braunschweig, has been returned to the heirs by the Herzog August Library (HAB).

Mielziner was born in Aalborg, Denmark, and moved to Braunschweig in 1876, where he became a naturalised German citizen in 1885. He worked in the city as a merchant and insolvency administrator. Between 1886 and 1921 he served as a representative of the local Jewish community and from then until 1925 as its head.

Benny Mielziner was married to Marie Therese Widmann (1853 – 1940); the couple had five children. The family belonged to Braunschweig’s respected upper-middle class until the 1930s, but after the Nazi seizure of power they increasingly became the target of antisemitic repression. Some family members were able to go into hiding in the Netherlands or escape persecution by emigrating.

Benny Mielziner was regarded as a highly educated man and an outstanding connoisseur of German Classicism. Since the book bears his personal stamp of ownership, it is highly likely that it originated from his private collection.

The volume now returned from the holdings of the Herzog August Library is from a collection suspected of containing Nazi-looted cultural property. The collection was acquired by the library in 1987, having previously been in the possession of literary scholar Hans Pyritz (1905 – 1958), who assembled it between the 1930s and 1950s.

The rightful heirs were identified as Benny Mielziner’s surviving great-granddaughters. The book was restituted to them in December 2024, and they decided to donate it to the library.

The provenance of the volume was researched in connection with the project Nazi-Looted Books among the Antiquarian Acquisitions of the Herzog August Bibliothek since 1969, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation. Systematic research into the library’s holdings to check for cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution is being continued under the current project NS-Raubgut unter den Zugängen der Herzog August Bibliothek 1933 – 1969 [Nazi-looted property among the acquisitions of the Herzog August Library 1933-1969], which is likewise funded by the Foundation.