According to research, a large number of paper restorers and bookbinders were employed by the Nazis and “directly contributed to genocide” during World War II.
A British historian discovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s and 1940s in which restorers repaired and cleaned historical church and civic records so that the Nazis could clearly identify anyone with Jewish ancestry.
Dr Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and an associate member of Worcester College at the University of Oxford, found Nazi letters and other material showing the role craftsmen played in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages in search of inherited “ethnic” status.
In various government institutions, including the German Federal Archives in Berlin, she found documents showing the complexity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists who used their skills in Germany and in the occupied countries.
“They’re creating a cumulative record of who might be killed — a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce ‘caste’ registration of the population.”
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “She saw the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was accomplished through cleaning papers, despite knowing that you needed to prove your heritage,” Blewett said.
“I found official documents in the archives about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials purporting to purge documents in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”
Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder named Franz Krause from the town of Niesse in present-day southwestern Poland was among those recruited.
In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “The German church books, which bind the lowest place and every small farm, numbering more than a hundred thousand volumes, are the most important source of evidence for the history, descent and genealogy of the German population.
Many centuries-old manuscripts are illegible because they are fragile, dirty, and moldy.
Despite their potential importance as historical documents, restorers used “very destructive processes,” Blewett said. “They’re not ensuring the safety of historic objects, they’re making them readable. They don’t really care what these objects are.”
For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make entries legible, although this fell short of accepted conservation practice at the time. “Physically rubbing glycerin runs the risk of tearing the already damaged paper and softening the paper fibers by swelling them,” says Blewett. “I also found promotional material from technology companies that made the laminating material used to make very fragile pages more readable.”
Blewett, who had previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled into researching the cultural heritage institutions set up under the Nazis. “I found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning up church documents. It led me to look further into what the scheme was and what it involved in creating proof of Aryan ancestry.”
Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration under the Nazi Regime, published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. “Through their work, the Restorationists conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal activity,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards are abundant. But their reputations are largely unsullied.”
Michael Daley, director of restoration watchdog Artwatch UK, said the investigation had revealed “an appalling abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the form of things, for good or evil,” he said.
