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Discusses the process of the economic annihilation of the Jews in Hungary, who- from the economic point of view - were more influential than any other Jewish community in Europe. Following the German occupation in March 1944 the collaborating Hungarian government attempted to assert its claim concerning the complete confiscation of Jewish assets at all stages of the road leading to the extermination camps. The cooperation with the Germans proved to be the most problematic in this area. The story of the Jewish Gold Train is a relatively small but all the more emblematic chapter of the economic annihilation. The circumstances of the freight's assembling, the German-Hungarian conflicts concerning the train, the looting attempts, the fate of the assets seized by the Allies (double victimization of the survivors) provide the reader with an insight into the history of the repeated looting of the Hungarian Jewry.

The rising significance of Holocaust commemoration has advanced provenance research of Nazi-looted material Jewish heritage and has shown the urgent need for reliable resources in order to cope with the particular challenges of identifying Judaica objects. This review essay examines the theoretical foundations of provenance research in Germany and presents two indispensalbe resources that help with practical provenance research. The Lost Art Database, maintained by the Lost Art Foundation, documents cultural assets beeing illegaly confiscated by the Nazis. The Handbook on Judaica Provenance Research: Ceremonial Object, an open access electronic publication, funded by Claims Conference and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), provides detailed information to identify Jewish cultural objects. The theoretical framework of memory culture in Germany is explored in the book by Dora Osborne, What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture. In this oustanding analysis of the functions of archives in the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past, Osborne rightly emphasizes the archival turn in German memory culture and proves its importance.  

The organized theft of fine art by Nazi Germany has captivated worldwide attention in the last twenty years. As much as any other topic arising out of World War Two, stolen art has proven to be an issue that simply will not go away. Newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums, foreign nations, and even their own family members. These stories are enduring because they speak to one of the core tragedies of the Nazi era: how a nation at the pinnacle of fine art and culture spawned a legalized culture of theft and plunder. A Tragic Fate is the first book to seriously address the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of art. It provides a history of Art and Culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.

Die Suche nach in der NS-Zeit geraubten Büchern und ihre Restitution beschäftigt manche Bibliotheken schon seit Jahren, andere bisher noch nicht. Doch die NS-Provenienzforschung ist kaum abschließbar: Auch in Zukunft gibt es neue Hinweise und kommen potenziell betroffene Bücher in die Bibliotheksbestände. Das Buch bietet BibliotheksmitarbeiterInnen und Interessierten ein Grundverständnis der Problematik und das Rüstzeug, um bedenkliche Fälle in der alltäglichen Arbeit zu erkennen und zu behandeln. Es zeigt, wie Provenienzforschung in die Organisation integriert werden kann, wie betroffene Bücher sowie die rechtmäßigen EigentümerInnen identifiziert werden können, wie die einzelnen Fälle und Exemplare bearbeitet werden und wie wichtig dabei die Verbreitung der Forschungsergebnisse und die Vernetzung mit anderen ist.

In all, 90% of Polish Jews, more than 3 million people, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and 90% of the survivors left Poland. The survivors and their heirs, most of them not currently living in Poland, saw their land confiscated by the Nazis, nationalized by the communists and reprivatized and sold to others. Poland is the only country in the EU not to have a comprehensive restitution law. The issue of land restitution is still present in current debate in Poland, as part of a broader discussion over the Second World War, communism, privatization and corruption. While Poland blocked all restitution claims in 2021, Jewish communities as well as other governments called Poland to adopt a comprehensive restitution law for everyone. Now, 30 years after the fall of communism, what justifies such claims? This paper argues that forward-looking collective responsibility is the most helpful concept to understand the Jewish restitution problem in Poland today, and claims that any future settlement of this issue should be based on it. By applying this concept, as developed by Iris Marion Young, to the Polish restitution case, we look into the past – not to look for people to blame, but to look for social connections that have implications for the present. This way, we can remember the past, learn from it and heal relationships between people without being slaves to it.

Die Reihe Praxiswissen bietet Praktikern in Bibliotheken, Archiven und verwandten Informationseinrichtungen Antworten auf Fragen, die sich aus der täglichen Arbeit ergeben. Aktuelle Beispiele und Lösungsansätze werden von ausgewiesenen Fachleuten vorgestellt. Die enthaltenen Arbeitsmittel wie Checklisten, konkrete Textvorschläge, z. B. für Briefe oder Webseiten, Fragebögen usw. machen die Bände zu unentbehrlichen Arbeitsmitteln für Praktiker.

The purpose of this article is the source characterization of the prop- erty inventories of Lublin Jews and the indication of the possibility of their use in the study of the history and culture of this community. The source base are inventories collected as a result of a query conducted by the Notaries of the City of Lublin in the years 1810–1863. As a result of source searches, ninety-eight lists of the remains belonging to the following categories of inhabitants of the Jewish district in Lublin were collected: merchants, craftsmen, property owners, people dealing with finances, and small traders. Detailed inventories contain informa- tion about the owner and his family, as well as real estate, household equipment, clothing, and other personal items. Almost half of the inventories list the titles of individual books or lists of larger book collections. The above-mentioned sources, due to their mass nature, allow us to go beyond individual findings and authorize us to formulate more general judgments. Inventories from notarial records are therefore a valuable source for expanding knowledge of genealogy, everyday life, material and spiritual culture, and religion of Lublin Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis. He touches on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labour camps, and the problems of de-Nazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study - cooperation with Nazi policies, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision-making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated - are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on free access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era.

The Landesmuseum Mainz holds a bundle of objects (paintings, works on paper, furniture) that entered its collections in September 1943 as a transferral ordered by the Oberfinanzpräsident of the State of Hesse. The objects had been confiscated by the fiscal authorities of Mainz and Darmstadt immediately after their owners had been deported. In terms of artistic quality, these pieces could be described as “living room art,” a term that well reflects the social function of Jewish upper-middle-class material culture. By combining the methodologies of provenance research and material culture studies, this article analyzes how the “living room art” that once belonged to the German Jewish middle-class closely related to social belonging, self-representation, and the identity of their owners and how the anti-Semitic persecution impacted their material life. This approach aims at reframing object-based provenance research – which is traditionally formulated in the context of the “art world,” for example, the study of art dealership, collecting, and museum history – in the context of the study of Jewish middle-class cultural consumption, small-scale private art collecting, and micro-history.

Lists and inventories permeated the experience of Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust, as well as that of those they left behind. The National Socialist and Vichy regimes were obsessive about both lists of Jews and inventories of their property. In the years and decades following the war, survivors and their heirs seeking restitution of their goods or reparations for their loss encountered entangled bureaucracies, each requiring their own form and rhetoric of inventory. This article explicates the work lists and inventories did for both oppressors and victims, as well as the rich insights they offer historians.