Nazi-looted property restituted to the Austrian Chamber of Labour Library for Social Sciences in Vienna

In connection with the research project Nazi-looted property among the antiquarian acquisitions of Herzog August Library since 1969, Herzog August Library (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel has returned three books to the Austrian Chamber of Labour Library for Social Sciences in Vienna.

The books were acquired from antiquarian bookshops in the early 1980s: Albert Schramm’s Deutschlands Verlagsbuchhandel (Leipzig 1925), Hundert Jahre Buchverlag (Düsseldorf 1921) and Anton Menger’s Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Socialismus (Berlin 1871). Based on provenance features such as stamps and notes, it was possible to identify them as having originally belonged to the former Social Science Study Library at the Chamber of Labour in Vienna.

“This symbolically compensates for what the Nazis planned as a cultural obliteration,” says Ute Wödl, head of the Austrian Chamber of Labour Library for Social Sciences in Vienna. The library of the Chamber of Labour targeted by the Nazis early on as they sought to symbolically launch an attack on the cultural identity of the workers’ movement. After the National Socialist period it was only possible to find some 35,000 of the original 160,000 books, since much of the collection had been destroyed or could no longer be traced.

The project Nazi-looted property among the antiquarian acquisitions of HAB since 1969 was funded by the German Lost Art Foundation. The library continues to pursue its efforts in this area of research through the follow-up project Nazi-looted property among the acquisitions of Herzog August Library in the years 1933-1969.