Doris Gladnikoff

In June 2025, a book and two bookplates belonging to Doris Gladnikoff (née Wedell) could be returned.

The former owner was sufficiently identified by means of a exclusion procedure. Only one person named Doris Wedell with a biographical connection to Berlin could be identified.

Doris Henrietta Margarethe Gladnikoff, née Wedell (born 27 September 1914 in Berlin), grew up in Berlin as the daughter of the businessman Georg Wedell (1884–1937) and the secretary Margarete Wedell, née Glogauer (1892–1942). She had a brother two years older than her, Hans Norbert Wedell (1912–1956). Her father Georg Wedell was the owner of a timber and coal wholesale business founded in 1921 and based at Morsestraße 10a in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He lived with his family in a villa at Kronberger Straße 1 in the Grunewald district.

The Wedells were persecuted by the National Socialists for being Jewish. After Georg Wedell's death in autumn 1937, his company was forcibly sold.

Doris Gladnikoff had trained as a technical assistant and in 1935 worked as an assistant to the specialist for internal diseases Dr. Kurt Regensburger (1894–1983) at a spa clinic in Bad Kissingen. Regensburger himself was persecuted by the Nazis and fled Germany at the end of the 1930s. Doris Gladnikoff initially moved back to Berlin at the end of 1935 to her parents' house in Kronberger Straße. After the death of her father in 1937, she and her mother Margarete moved into a flat at Hohenzollerndamm 111 in Berlin-Schmargendorf. Her brother Hans Wedell managed to escape to Great Britain in 1938, where he married Ilse Henschel and called himself Harold Norman Winton. Doris Gladnikoff was able to emigrate to Sweden in December 1938.

Her mother Margarete also planned to emigrate to Sweden, but unsuccessfully. On 25 January 1942, she was deported from Berlin to the Riga ghetto, where she was presumably shot immediately after her arrival on 30 January 1942. At the same time, the Nazi authorities seized and “realised” all of Margarete Wedell's assets, including the furnishings of her flat on Hohenzollerndamm and a book collection worth around Reichsmark 1,200. 

Doris married Herman Zvi Gladnikoff in Västerås, Swedish province of Västmanlands, in June 1942. She died on 10 December 1988 in Stockholm. Doris and Herman Gladnikoff had four children.

The Berlin City Library (Berliner Stadtbibliothek, BStB) acquired the book belonging to Doris Gladnikoff in a bundle with around 130 other copies from the Berlin City Pawnshop (Pfandleihanstalt Berlin) and incorporated it into its holdings in February 1943. 

According to current research, it is likely that the volumes have the same provenance as the so-called “Accession J” (‘Zugang J’), i.e. a bundle of around 40,000 books also purchased from the pawnshop in spring 1943, which can be proven to have come from the last apartments of deported Berlin Jews.

The two bookplates come from the ex libris collection of the Berlin City Library. It is not possible to reconstruct how they entered the collection and which books they were removed from.