A Guardian investigation reports that newly uncovered Nazi-era letters reveal how paper restorers and bookbinders across Europe helped compile ancestry records used to identify Jews during the Holocaust.
According to research by Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a British historian and associate member of Worcester College at the University of Oxford, conservators in the 1930s and 1940s repaired and cleaned centuries-old church and civil registers so the Nazi regime could trace Jewish ancestry. The restored records of births, baptisms, marriages and conversions were used to establish inherited “racial” status.
Blewett said documents found in German federal archives in Berlin and other institutions show the complicity of conservators, restorers and paper chemists working both in Germany and in occupied countries. “They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed, a kind of hit list,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Blewett said that while it was known people had to prove their heritage under Nazi racial laws, her research examined the technical methods used to make fragile documents readable. “I found official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials discussing cleaning documents, in the hope these records would represent ‘racial purity,’” she said.
Administrative records show that by 1940, a master bookbinder named Franz Krause from Neisse, now in southwestern Poland, was among those recruited. In one document, a Nazi official described German church books as “by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”
Many manuscripts were centuries old and had become fragile, dirty and moldy. Blewett said restorers sometimes used destructive methods to prioritize legibility over preservation. Pages were saturated with glycerine to clarify faded ink, a process that risked tearing damaged paper and weakening its fibers. She also found promotional material from companies producing laminating materials used to stabilize fragile pages for reading.
Blewett’s findings are detailed in her new book, “Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime,” published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. In the book, she writes that through their work, restorers aided the regime’s criminal policies and often benefited professionally, while their reputations remained largely intact.
Michael Daley, director of the restoration watchdog ArtWatch UK, described the research as exposing a “shocking abuse of skill,” adding that it demonstrated how much power lies with those who control the physical appearance of historical records.