Published on 26 September 2016
The largest library in Germany, the Royal Library, which was located in a building along Unter den Linden, was renamed during the Weimar Republic as the Prussian State Library. When the Nazis came to power, the library’s employees were replaced and people were hired that were faithful to the new board and members of the National-Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDA). Under the leadership of Hugo Andres Krüss, who had been the library’s director since 1925, the Prussian State Library became a national research library. This was in conflict with the German Library [Deutsche Bücherei] in Leipzig, which since 1931 had enjoyed the role of national library and published the German national bibliography annually. In 1935, it came to a point where the Reichsminister for education appointed the two libraries’ principal tasks. From then on, the Prussian State Library had, as its principal task, the cataloguing of all publications in languages other than German, a task Director Krüss did not view as an honourable one.
Krüss was nonetheless one of the main players in German library policy under Nazi board. He had many contacts abroad and played an important role in shaping the legislation concerning the German research libraries, personnel policy and education. In 1934, the Prussian State Library took over the role as administrator of the German research libraries’ central procurement office. Through this office, the German research libraries across the country were provided not only with purchased or exchanged material, but also seized books from Jewish individuals and organisations, political opponents of the regime and Masonic lodges. During the Second World War, books came into the library’s collection from the occupied territories. In summer 1940, Krüss was appointed Reichskommissar with the responsibility for libraries and books from the occupied western areas.
In 1941, the Prussian State Library was bombed and an attempt was made to rescue the collections. Books were placed around in Germany in abandoned mines, castles and monasteries. Towards the end of the war, the building on Unter den Linden was almost completely destroyed, and the collections were found in both the American and Soviet occupied zones. Many of the librarians were killed, and it is estimated that about 700,000 books were destroyed or disappeared. In 1947, Prussia was dissolved as a state by the Allies, and the Prussian State Library no longer had a state to live in and lost its financial support. The areas that had been part of Prussia went into various new states in Eastern and Western Germany. Thus the Prussian State Library was resurrected as two different libraries, one in East Berlin and one in West Berlin, where the books found in the east and the west, respectively, were collected.
In 1962, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation was established and it currently runs the previous Prussian State Library. On German reunification, the two libraries were merged into one administrative unit, which today is called the Berlin State Library, popularly known as “the library with two homes”.
The books that disappeared from the Prussian State library are found today in collections in Poland, the former Soviet Union and the Czech Republic. The library works with the repatriation of some valuable material and has itself played a central role in the German provenance research since 2005. The library itself has about 19,000 plundered books and other material that they are working to repatriate.