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Leo Baeck is regarded as one of the main representatives of liberal German Jewry in the pre-war period. He was a rabbi in Berlin who performed numerous political and administrative tasks, he was an author and a great intellectual personality. Today, numerous schools, research institutions, foundations and synagogues bearing his name commemorate his achievements. Until his deportation to Theresienstadt on 27 January 1943, Leo Baeck had an extensive private library in his flat in Berlin-Schöneberg, the whereabouts of which are still unknown today.

The return was based on provenance research by the Berlin State Library into a previously unprocessed book collection. How and when these objects came to the State Library cannot yet be reconstructed due to a lack of documentation. However, by examining handwritten annotations and ownership notes, it was possible to assign them to the former collection of Leo Baeck, whereupon the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation immediately contacted the heirs. They have not yet received any compensation or restitution for the loss of the books due to persecution.

For some time now, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage) has been intensifying the processing of objects with initially unclear provenance and, as already reported, was also able to hand over music from the former property of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein to his descendants a few days ago. As in the case of Leo Baeck's books, this was also a case of loss without compensation due to persecution. Provenance research on library collections is much more difficult than is the case with works of art. It is therefore all the more gratifying when the Foundation comes to clear conclusions and is then able to hand over collection items to the rightful heirs on its own initiative.

Leo Baeck was born in 1873 in Lissa, a town that belonged to the German Reich at the time and became Polish after the First World War. He worked as a rabbi in Oppeln, Düsseldorf and from 1912 in Berlin (in the Charlottenburg synagogue in Fasanenstraße). In Berlin, he initiated the Christian-Jewish dialogues, which aimed to promote interreligious and cultural understanding between Jews and Christians in Germany. Initially chairman of the General German Rabbinical Association, he was appointed president of the Reich Representation of German Jews in 1933 and also remained chairman of the "Reich Association of Jews in Germany", which was decreed by the Nazi regime, until it was dissolved by the Gestapo in 1943. Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt that year. Several of his siblings, who lived in Germany and Czechoslovakia, also suffered this fate, whereas his granddaughter Marianne Dreyfus had already left the country with her parents in 1939 to emigrate to England. After his liberation, Leo Baeck settled in London, where he founded the "Institute for the Study of the History of Judaism in Germany since the Enlightenment", which was later named after him. Until his death in 1956, he worked towards reconciliation and dialogue between Jews and Christians. His religious-philosophical work "The Essence of Judaism", which was conceived as a response to Adolf von Harnack's "The Essence of Christianity", is considered a classic work of liberal Jewish theology.