dpa 29.08.2023
DSM launches database for looted Jewish property
The Provenance Research team at the German Maritime Museum (DSM) / Leibniz Institute of Maritime History is launching the first database that can be used to search for property confiscated from Jewish refugees during the Nazi era. The official launch of the LostLift database is September 1 - the day on which the Second World War began in 1939.
Eva Evans was 14 years old when her parents took the paintings off the walls of their large Berlin apartment, carefully packed candlesticks and stowed all the household goods in boxes to send them to Great Britain. Life under the National Socialists became increasingly dangerous for the Jewish family. Once they arrived in the country that was to become the new home of the now 99-year-olds, the family waited in vain for the removal goods. They were supposed to reach Great Britain by ship. But only the hand luggage of many of the so-called liftvans - as the moving boxes were called - arrived. All the other boxes were auctioned off, Evans learned only a few weeks ago. More than half a century later, the British woman, who wrote a book about her life as a refugee, is helping to pick up the trail of the missing removal goods.
»Mrs. Evans is the first contemporary witness to come forward as a result of our research. Otherwise it’s the descendants who do that,« says Dr. Kathrin Kleibl, a provenance researcher who traces the origins and whereabouts of confiscated and auctioned household effects. Eva Evans vividly remembers how the customs officer came to the apartment and meticulously looked through the lists. »I sent her the auction record found in the archive and she was able to help me identify some of the items. That was very touching because, on the one hand, she was able to reappraise a piece of family history and, on the other, it provided important information for provenance research,« says Kleibl.
Since 2018, two research projects at the DSM funded by the German Lost Art Foundation have been investigating the processes of expropriation of Jewish people in the ports of Bremen and Hamburg. Dr. Kathrin Kleibl and Susanne Kiel are carrying out painstaking detective work to examine thousands of documents from the state archives in Hamburg and Bremen. In recent years, they have entered information on auctioned furniture, musical instruments, paintings etc. into the LostLift database - the first and only one of its kind to date. There are already 5,500 entries in the register of persons. A further 3,200 or so specific cases of robbery have been added. Each entry reconstructs the path of a family’s belongings according to the situation as it was handed down - from leaving the home with a forwarding agent to confiscation in a port city and finally the auction of the property. The files of the restitution proceedings applied for by the families in the post-war period complete the picture. In addition, information on the individual parties involved - aggrieved families themselves, shipping companies, courts or purchasers of the items - can now be searched online at the click of a mouse.
»We want to use the database to draw attention to this aspect of the robbery of Jews under National Socialism, which has been little researched to date, and encourage people - especially in Bremen and Hamburg - to provide us with further information. Are there any heirlooms that do not clearly come from the family but were bought during the war?« asks Kleibl. The provenance researchers know about the perfidious infrastructure under the National Socialists: almost all citizens, small shipping companies and dealers were involved in the auctions.
The researchers’ work is a starting signal and could set off a wave. The team is just getting started, as the German-English database is growing by the minute with every entry. In terms of the course of history, however, the reappraisal comes 75 years too late. »What we are doing should have been done much earlier. But in the founding phase of the Federal Republic, people kept quiet in order to avert possible reparation payments and to avoid being confronted with the guilt. If you like, we are following in the footsteps of the former State Offices for Reparations, but we are going even further in our research: we are making it clear that the people who fled abroad were also victims of National Socialist Germany,« says Kiel.
The LostLift database can be accessed at lostlift.dsm.museum
