2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) and the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) have restituted a total of five books from their collections to the descendants of the important French journalist and politician Georges Mandel. Mandel, who took a clear stance against the Nazi regime even before the outbreak of the Second World War, was persecuted after the occupation of France and murdered by the Milice française in 1944. The books were handed over on Friday 15 July 2022 by French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne in the presence of Andreas Görgen, Head of Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, at the Matignon in Paris.

The four books restituted by the SPK were identified in the Berlin State Library as part of the provenance research project for the Central Office for Old Scientific Collections (ZwA). The research project was funded by the German Centre for Lost Cultural Assets. Another work of the same provenance was found in the SLUB Dresden. The SPK coordinated the restitution process and, with the support of the Commission pour l'indemnisation des victimes des spoliations et intervenues du fait de législations antisémites en vigueur pendant l'Occupation (CIVS), contacted the heirs of Georges Mandel and offered them restitution.

Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth: "The restitution of these five books is an example of the implementation of the Washington Principles. This not only shows the importance of systematic provenance research in the collections, but also the significance of international co-operation. I would like to sincerely thank my French colleagues for their support. It is Germany's everlasting responsibility to continue to systematically deal with the Nazi theft of cultural property."

Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, says: "I am delighted that we are once again able to return works from the State Library that were confiscated from a Nazi persecutee. Works in our collections that have such a background must be identified and just and fair solutions must be found for them in accordance with the Washington Principles. We have been working on this for many years and have now been able to return over 350 works of art and more than 2,000 books to their rightful owners."

Achim Bonte, Director General of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, explains: "I see the fact that the return of the looted books is taking place at the official residence of the French Prime Minister as a very encouraging sign for international provenance research. Considerable efforts will still be required to minimise the injustice that has been done. The State Library will continue to do its utmost to process its holdings."

Katrin Stump, Director General of the SLUB Dresden: "We are very pleased that we were able to return these works to the descendants of Georges Mandel thanks to the joint activities. This also shows how important nationwide provenance research is. Thanks to systematic research, the SLUB Dresden has already been able to restitute several hundred books in the last ten years. Much more important than the numbers, however, are the fates behind them, and so it is also our task to tell the stories behind them."

Georges Mandel

Georges Mandel (* 5 June as Louis Georges Rothschild 1885 in Chatou, Département Yvelines; † 7 July 1944 in the forest of Fontainebleau) came from a Jewish family and was a French journalist and politician. He was a staunch opponent of the appeasement policy towards the Nazi regime, warned urgently of the dangers posed by Nazi Germany even before the outbreak of the Second World War and publicly criticised the Munich Agreement.

Initially working as a journalist for the newspaper "L'Aurore", Mandel became Georges Clemenceau's private secretary and later head of cabinet. From 1919, he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies. From 1934 to 1936, Mandel was Minister of Posts, Telegrams and Telephones (PTT), from April 1938 to May 1940 Minister of Colonies, then Minister of the Interior until June 1940. After the German invasion and Philippe Pétain's assumption of power on 16 June 1940, Mandel lost his ministerial office. He was arrested for the first time in Bordeaux in June 1940, but was released after a short time. He then travelled to Morocco as part of a government in exile, where he was arrested in August 1940. He was taken to Vichy France and sentenced to life imprisonment in the so-called Trial of Riom in October 1941. Shortly after the occupation of southern France, Georges Mandel was handed over to the Nazi regime in November 1942, which imprisoned him in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and in a special camp for political prisoners from the occupied territories near the Buchenwald concentration camp. Finally, in 1944, he was extradited to France to the Milice française, a paramilitary organisation that murdered him in the Fontainebleau forest on 7 July 1944.

At the same time as Georges Mandel was arrested in 1940, his flat was confiscated by German units. Mandel's library, which contained 15,000 volumes on contemporary political issues, among other things, was also "seized" and books were subsequently demonstrably taken to Germany. To date, only just under 700 volumes have been recovered and restituted.

Restituted works

The volumes that have now been returned are copies of contemporary historical and political writings published in Paris by René Gillouin (1930) and by Paul Achat, Gaston Bergery, Jacques Binger and Marcel Homet (from 1937 to 1939), which were given to Georges Mandel by their respective authors and inscribed with handwritten dedications. As early as 1950, two of the volumes owned by Mandel can be found in the Öffentliche Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek (the successor institution to the Prussian State Library in East Berlin). The other Berlin copies were acquired via the Central Office for Old Scientific Collections in 1960 and 1979/1980, while the Dresden copy was purchased by the Central Antiquarian Bookshop of the GDR in 1973. The fate of the books in the preceding years (i.e. since the looting in France) cannot be precisely reconstructed at present.
Dedications and title pages: https://provenienz.gbv.de/Georges_Mandel

The joint restitution of the SBB and the SLUB is due not least to the good networking of provenance researchers at libraries, in particular via the Provenance Research and Restitution - Libraries (APR-Bib) working group, which has existed since 2014 and is linked to the German Library Association (dbv) via the Provenance Research and Provenance Cataloguing Commission.

The Berlin State Library has been dealing with the problem of Nazi-looted property in its collections for over 20 years. As early as 1999, the acquisitions of the Prussian State Library from the period 1933 to 1945 were randomly analysed for former Jewish property. As part of a master's thesis in 2006, relevant acquisition files and accession journals were analysed with regard to "dubious acquisitions"; basic research was and is still being carried out primarily as part of projects on the Reichstauschstelle and the ZwA, for example; more information below. Since 2007, a provenance research team has been working on the systematic examination of the approximately 3 million volumes of historical printed material. The results are promptly made searchable with the respective status; up-to-date figures on researched books, restitutions etc. can be found in the provenance portal of the State Library https://provenienz.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ns-raubgut.

The SLUB Dresden has been conducting systematic provenance research projects since 2009 with the support of various funding organisations. This began with an examination of the additions from 1945 to 1990 to so-called castle salvage estates, which were transferred to various cultural institutions in the course of the expropriation of manor houses and castles in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR. Since 2009, the holdings of their predecessor institutions have been examined with regard to cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution - initially those of the Saxon State Library, and since September 2021 those of the Dresden University Library. Identified traces of ownership are published in the online catalogue of the SLUB Dresden and in the Deutsche Fotothek; detailed articles and case dossiers are presented transparently on the project website and via the Qucosa publication server.