Commune of Verpel, France
The church of Verpel
The parish register with the stamp of the community of Verpel
In 2017, a handwritten parish register from the municipality of Verpel, France, was returned to the departmental archives of the Ardennes.
The route of access to the Berlin City Library's stock is unclear. The supplier ‘Kulturamt’ assigned in the acquisition journal probably refers to the Department of Public Education at the Berlin Magistrate's Office, but the assignment was made shortly after the end of the war. The supplier ‘Kulturamt’ was used in an inflationary manner during this time. It is therefore quite possible that the church register was already stored in the library before 1945, but was only inventoried after the end of the war.
Nothing is known about the journey from Verpel to Berlin, but according to the Departmental Archives of the Ardennes, the book was no longer in Verpel already after World War I.
The book was returned at the conference "Où sont les bibliothèques spoliées par les nazis? Tentatives d'identification et de restitution, un chantier en cours / Where are the libraries looted by the Nazis? Efforts at identification and restitution, a work in progress" in Paris.