Restitution to Freemasons – “Forgotten Victims of National Socialism”
News from 06/27/2016
In June 2016, the Foundation returned 384 books to a Masonic lodge. The SPK has previously returned other works to these “forgotten victims” of National Socialism
Speaking at the handover ceremony, Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, pointed out that: “It was not only Jews that were persecuted, disenfranchised, and dispossessed under National Socialism. Many other sections of the population suffered repression, including the Freemasons. There is a duty to make their history known, too, and to return any property that is rightfully theirs.” He mentioned that the SPK had also restituted objects to the Freemasons previously. In 2010, for instance, it had returned some paintings from the Alte Nationalgalerie to Frankfurt.
The Books of the “Teutonia zur Weisheit” St John’s Lodge
The “Teutonia zur Weisheit” (Teutonia to Wisdom) St John’s Lodge was founded in Potsdam in 1809. Under pressure from the Nazi regime, it had to start winding itself up in 1934 and cease its activities entirely in the summer of 1935. It was not until 1991 that the lodge was reconstituted.
The library of the lodge had been once among the largest of its kind in Germany. When the masons were forced to dissolve their lodge, they transferred the books to the Prussian State Library as a “gift”. The 384 books that have now been returned were discovered by the staff of the Transparenz schaffen (Create Transparency) project during their examination of the archives of the Staatsbibliothek. The books’ provenance is indicated by the different stamps, accession numbers, and classification numbers used by the lodge.
Because these volumes were clearly cultural property that had been relinquished in direct consequence of Nazi persecution, the SPK consulted the lodge to arrange their return. On June 23, 2016, Barbara Schneider-Kempf, the Director-General of the Staatsbibliothek, presented this large collection of books to Matthias Bohn, a member of the committee of the “Teutonia zur Weisheit” St John’s Lodge. The volumes had been digitized by the SPK beforehand. In Potsdam too, they will remain available to scholars.
Many years earlier, in 1965, 640 other books from the lodge had been identified in the Staatsbibliothek of West Berlin. At that time, the “Teutonia zur Weisheit” St John’s Lodge had not yet been reconstituted, so the SPK restituted these volumes to the Grand National Mother Lodge “Zu den drei Weltkugeln” (The Three Globes).
The archive of the “Teutonia zur Weisheit” St John’s Lodge is kept, like many other Masonic archives, in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Secret State Archives).
Paintings From the “Zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe” Masonic Lodge
In September 2011, the Foundation handed over three paintings from the Alte Nationalgalerie to a society called “Freimaurerloge zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe” (Dawn Twilight Freemasons’ Lodge). “Zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe” was a Masonic lodge founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1807. During the first decades of its existence, it served as the central forum for the progressive Jewish bourgeoisie in Frankfurt. At the time, Jews were still excluded from membership of most clubs. Although it was committed to the ideal of religious tolerance, the lodge had a predominantly Jewish profile until 1935, when freemasonry was finally suppressed by the Nazi regime. Only a few of its 150-odd brothers survived the years of persecution and war. In 1950, a society was founded as the legal successor of the lodge.
The three works that were restituted in 2011 had been advertised as “third-party property” by the Alte Nationalgalerie since 2008. They came from a group of objects that had been labeled in East Berlin as formerly belonging to the Historical Museum of Breslau (now Wrocław). The museum had not existed previously, so the origin of the pictures remains largely unknown. In 2010, these three paintings were successfully traced to the lodge in Frankfurt. After being confiscated by the Nazis in 1935, they had probably ended up in a collection center in Breslau. At the end of the war, they would have passed into the hands of the Soviet authorities, who passed them on to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (East) in 1958.
All three paintings are by well-known Jewish artists working in Frankfurt: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882), his grandson Alfred Nathaniel Oppenheim (1873-1953), and Julius Hülsen (1873-1931). They show Jewish citizens of high social standing in Frankfurt. Given this background, the “Freimaurerloge zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe” society has donated the paintings to the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.