Henry Goldsmith

In 2025, nine volumes of an encyclopaedia from the library of Henry Goldsmith (formerly Heinz Goldschmidt) could be returned.

Heinz Goldschmidt was born in Berlin on 4 March 1915, the son of Karl Goldschmidt and Rosa Goldschmidt, née Goldschmidt. The volumes were clearly identified with Henry Goldsmith as the previous owner via the dedication contained in volume one of the encyclopedia: "To my dear Heinz. For his bar mitzvah! 10 March 1928 Jakob Goldschmidt".

As the surname of the dedicator could initially not be correctly deciphered, the research focused instead on the dedicatee Heinz and the date of the dedication for his bar mitzvah. A matching entry in the community bulletin of the Jewish community of Berlin from 1 May 1928 reports on the service for Heinz Goldschmidt, among others, on 10 March 1928 in the Levetzowstraße synagogue.

Using the now correctly deciphered surname, the donor could be clearly identified as the banker, art collector and philanthropist Jakob Goldschmidt (1882-1955). The unambiguous attribution was finally made by means of a signature comparison.

Genealogical research confirmed that Jakob Goldschmidt was a paternal uncle of Heinz Goldschmidt. Jakob Goldschmidt was also the founder of the initiative committee of the German-language Encyclopaedia Judaica. The identified volumes are a rare special edition, hand-bound in full leather, limited to 100 copies and numbered. The edition for Heinz Goldschmidt bears the number 17, and the fact that this number is also present in volumes two to nine proves that the entire edition belonged to Heinz Goldschmidt. Apart from the dedication in the first volume, there are no other clearly identifiable ownership marks in the volumes, apart from those of the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden and the BStB.

The Goldschmidt family was persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany. The donor Jakob Goldschmidt emigrated to the United States via Switzerland from 1934. Heinz' sister Liselotte Weinbaum, née Goldschmidt, born in 1907, was able to escape to the United States in 1936, as were his parents Rosa and Karl Goldschmidt, in 1940.

Heinz Goldschmidt had already left Berlin in April 1933 and escaped to Liverpool via Antwerp, where he initially worked as a cotton broker. He emigrated to the United States in 1937. There he joined the US Army in 1940. On his registration card, his change of name from Heinz Goldschmidt to Henry Goldsmith is evident, as is his close connection to his uncle Jakob Goldschmidt, who is listed as his main contact.

Henry Goldsmith became one of the “Ritchie Boys”, a military intelligence unit consisting mainly of Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria. Here he served as an instructor, was a liaison officer to the British Army in England and interrogated German officers after the end of the war.

During his service, Henry Goldsmith met the Broadway actress Janet Fox, born in Chicago in 1912, and the two married before the end of the war. Their daughter Julie was born in New York in 1946. Goldsmith later worked as a manager for the mail-order bookshop Greystone Press. In the late 1980s, he and Janet Goldsmith moved to Palm Beach, Florida. Janet Goldsmith died there in 2002, Henry Goldsmith followed her in 2014.

The encyclopaedia was added to the stock of the Berlin City Library (Berliner Stadtbibliothek, BStB) as a gift in 1946 and has been in circulation ever since. Only the in-house book storage is listed as the vendor in the acquisition journal. Some of the volumes are numbered by the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden. This organisation, which was founded in Berlin immediately after the end of the war as the successor to the Reichskulturkammer (RKK), had also taken over the RKK library, a possible indication that the copies had temporarily been transferred there. However, apart from some numbers in the volumes that cannot be clearly assigned, there are no other traces of interim ownership after the looting. The Kammer der Kunstschaffenden was dissolved as early as 1946. The acquisition of its stock by the BStB has not yet been investigated in detail and requires further research.