Provenienzforschung - NS-Raubgut in der SLUB

In March 2013, it was possible to return 159 books to the heirs of Sigmund Waldes (born in Prague in 1877, died in Maspeth/Long Island USA in 1961).

The brothers Sigmund and Heinrich Waldes were respected manufacturers of buttons and had workshops in Prague, Dresden, Long Island and in Switzerland. Since 1908, Sigmund Waldes was one of the partners of the factory in Dresden, in Kleine Plauensche Gasse no. 37/43. Immediately after the National Socialist government came to power in Germany, he moved to Paris and later emigrated to New York via Barcelona, where he took over the local branch and developed it into the head office. Sigmund Waldes died in 1961.

The journey of the books started in 1938, when the collection of the bibliophile prints of the 19th and 20th centuries was confiscated in Dresden and sold to the Saxon State Library by a middleman in 1941. In 2001, the SLUB used the portal www.lostart.de to announce the existence of the collection in the Lost and Found Reports section. Contact with the heirs was established years later thanks to the efforts of an American citizen living in Berlin, who became aware of this collection from the entry in lostart.de. As a result, the SLUB was able to restitute Sigmund Waldes’s books.

You will find more information on the restitution of these books in Aurich, Frank/Köhler, Norman: Ein langer Weg. Übergabe der Bibliothek von Sigmund Waldes. BIS - Das Magazin der Bibliotheken in Sachsen – 6 (2013)2, Pg. 114 – 115 (The Magazine of the Libraries in Saxony).