On continuing archival research, this time in the Bundesarchive in Germany

Published on 3 July 2017

Within the 4th BFB initiative, ten days of research in the German Federal Archives was planned, to take place in second half of June 2017.

The aim of this stay was to expand the knowledge of the foreign section of the Reserve Fonds of the National Library of the Czech Republic, which came to the territory of the Sudetenland at the end of WWII.

We have been aware of the fact that the R 58 fonds (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) would be useful for our research, as some of the fonds’ files were used in the past by historians. The R 58/5407 and R 58/6485 files were to be our main focus. These files contain fragments of the book catalogue that were processed by the Nazis at Mimoň castle after the evacuation of books from Berlin. This will allow us in the future to identify unambiguously some of the books found in the fonds of the National Library of the Czech Republic.

However, a number of other materials were studied; for example, concerning libraries of the individual gestapo and SD offices in the Protectorate. It is not clear to this day where those libraries ended up.

Some of the information from the research was used in the book Hidden or Forbidden? The remarkable history of the books stored in the Reserve Collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic; further information will be used in the ongoing research and survey of the fonds.