Confiscated books: the Reich Exchange Office and the Prussian State Library 1933–1945

From 2006 to 2009, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin conducted a research project in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for History (later: MPI for the History of Science). The project was financed using funding from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Its aim was to clarify as comprehensively as possible the institutional structures and library processes with a view to legal and financial aspects. It also aimed to examine the scope for action enjoyed by the stakeholders involved and the political dimension of the procedures.

An in-depth study by the project researcher Dr. Cornelia Briel resulted from this research project. This study was published by Akademie Verlag in 2013. Based on a rich variety of material and thoroughly indexed, it meticulously addresses the topic of Reich Exchange Office and Prussian State Library. It can thus be considered a work of reference for further research on Nazi-looted property, both in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and in other libraries. An exceptionally broad range of sources was assessed. In addition to the archival records of the Staatsbibliothek itself, the relevant holdings of the following institutions were analyzed: the Federal Archives, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, the Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Brandenburg Main State Archive in Potsdam, the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden and the Staatsfilialarchiv Bautzen. In addition, it was possible for the first time to consult the files of the Acquisitions Department of the Prussian State Library for the period 1938 to 1945. These were handed over to the Polish authorities in the summer of 1945 by the department, which had been relocated to Hirschberg (now Jelenia Góra) in Lower Silesia. Today, the files are kept in Jelenia Góra in the branch office of the Wrocław State Archive (Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu, Oddział w Jeleniej Górze).

The investigations have shown that both the Prussian State Library and the Reich Exchange Office were at the center of a network which handed out substantial quantities of books to academic libraries and other institutions within the Reich. These books had been confiscated from persecuted Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich. In this context, new knowledge has emerged regarding the extent to which both institutions competed from around 1936 onward with Nazi institutions and Nazi organizations whose primary task was plunder and robbery (such as various institutions of the SS or the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce). However, despite relevant decrees from the Ministry of Finance, neither the State Library nor the Reich Exchange Office could hold its ground against them as regards the acquisition of expropriated and confiscated books.

Reichstauschstelle (Reich Exchange Office)

In the perception of outsiders at the time, the Reich Exchange Office had always been vaguely associated with the Prussian State Library due to personnel links among management and also because it had been located in the library building in Unter den Linden, Berlin, for many years. However, at no point was it a department of the Prussian State Library. Founded in 1926, the Reich Exchange Office came under the remit of the Libraries Committee of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (established in 1920). In the course of the National Socialist renewal which its president, the physicist Johannes Stark, had begun pursuing in 1933, the Notgemeinschaft (which was soon to become the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) parted with its Libraries Committee in fall 1933. The three institutions that emerged from the Libraries Committeethe Reich Exchange Office, the Procurement Office for German Libraries and the Exchange Service for German and Foreign Bookswere placed under the administrative authority of the director general of the Prussian State Library, Hugo Andres Krüß. Their management was the responsibility of Adolf Jürgens, a deputized senior staff member of the Prussian State Library. From 1941 onward, the Reich Exchange Office gained greater autonomy when it was merged with the Procurement Office to form an authority of the Reich. In order to replace German library holdings which had been destroyed during the war, the Reich Exchange Office acquired private libraries, antiquarian volumes and newly published books in the German Reich and also in territories under German occupation. Apart from a few exceptions, these were acquired by way of purchase. Whenever possible, this was done by exploiting the exchange rates imposed by the German occupying power. The Reich Exchange Office also sought to acquire duplicates which were concentrated in the occupied territories after being confiscated from private collections and church libraries. It has now been possible to clarify the background of such acquisitions on the basis of files relating to the libraries in Luxembourg, Metz municipal library, the State and University Library Strasbourg and the Book Collecting Point in Poznań. In the German Reich, the Reich Exchange Office bought up the confiscated libraries and book collections of emigrated or deported Jewish Germans, whose property was utilized by the financial authorities. At the end of the war, the Reich Exchange Office and Procurement Office for German Libraries employed more than 50 people. As part of the reconstruction program, they set up around 40 depots all over Germany and beyond in which approx. 1,000,000 books were stored up to 1945.

Prussian State Library

In the course of the investigations, it became clear that it was not the Reich Exchange Office (as previously assumed) that had taken a key role in the distribution of confiscated books, but the Prussian State Library itself. As far as is currently understood, the Reich Exchange Offices primary task was not the utilization of confiscated libraries. Instead, it only appeared as a secondary distribution institution to which the Prussian State Library handed over duplicates or unwanted books from confiscated collections.

By decree of the Prussian Ministry of Finance of March 27, 1934, the Prussian State Library was commissioned and authorized to expand its own holdings as a matter of priority with books confiscated in Prussia. Pieces it did not need itself were to be passed on primarily to German university libraries. In this way, the Acquisitions Department of the Prussian State Library became the center of a distribution network that included more than 30 German and Austrian academic libraries.

In 1938 and 1939, further decrees of the Reich Finance Ministry designated the Prussian State Library the central collecting point for Hebraica, Judaica and political and aesthetic literary works that had mainly been confiscated from persecuted Jews. In this role, however, the Prussian State Library began competing in 1936 at the latest against National Socialist institutions that were collecting the literature of political and ideological enemies for the establishment of genuine National Socialist libraries.

In addition, between 1941 and 1944 the Prussian State Library received looted books from the German armed forces which had been stolen predominantly in the Soviet Union and in France.

(c) Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte