Museums in Rhineland-Palatinate looking for Nazi robbery: First check begins!

Museums in Rhineland-Palatinate looking for Nazi robbery: First check begins!

Since November 2024, the search for Nazi robbery has been running in four Rhineland-Palatinate museums, which is a significant measure to deal with the history of culture. Today, on February 10, 2025, the Mayen Eifel Museum joins this research phase after the Roentgen Museum Neuwied and the city museum Bad Dürkheim have been examined. The project is the first of its kind in Rhineland-Palatinate and is funded by the German Center for Loss of Culture, in cooperation with the Museumsverband Rheinland-Pfalz e.V.

The collection of the city museum in Bad Dürkheim, which comes from the local antiquity association, focuses on local history history. It harbors objects in connection with former Jewish fellow citizens, including photographs by the well -known opera singer Rosa Maas. An inventory book from the Nazi era and the extensive Glarb library with around 10,000 media are available for the investigation. The museum company Bad Dürkheim e.V. supports this important initiative.

implementation of the examinations

The provenance researcher Dr. Katja Terlau heads the investigations and analyzes inventory books from the 1930s and 1940s. It collects information on provenance characteristics and has already checked documentation material in the Roentgen Museum Neuwied in five weeks. There were suspicions of it, among other things, to an attachment desk and a table piano.

in the Eifel Museum, which documents about 20,000 objects on the culture and nature of the Eifel, the exact number of objects with provenance gaps from 1933 to 1945 could not yet be determined. The examination in the Mayen Eifel Museum is expected to take four weeks and also includes a comprehensive public presentation of the results after the end of the project.

background and support

The search for Nazi robbery is part of a comprehensive strategy that supports the federal government, the federal states and local top associations in a joint statement to find and return Nazi persecution due to cultural assets. These efforts also include the return of cultural assets that were returned or compensated for the Allied reimbursement regulations after the Second World War, and are designed to avoid duplication.

The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media provided around 88 million euros for provenance research from 2008 to 2022. Another 13 million euros are available for 2023. This offensive attitude for the processing of the Nazi cultural traide is not only a moral obligation, but also a legal framework in which museum and archive facilities work.

Overall, this project reflects the efforts to transparency and careful handling of cultural assets. In Germany, over 30,000 works of art, books and archives have already been identified and restituted as Nazi robbery. In view of these figures, it is essential that museums and other facilities actively participate in these return processes and thus contribute to the processing of the history.

The public can look forward to the publication of the results of the investigation, which will offer crucial insights into the provision law issues of the reviewed collections. The project not only pursues the return of cultural assets, but also a comprehensive promotion of education and awareness of the topics of withdrawal and loss during the Nazi era.

For further information on the topic of the Nazi robbery and their return, it is recommended to pursue the initiatives of the Federal Government as well as the offers of specialized institutions and universities that deal with the topic of provenance research. These not only present research projects, but also offer further training for specialists in the cultural sector.

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