Karl-Marx-Haus, Trier

Provenance research in the ZLB began when in 2002 books were identified that were clearly third-party property. They bore the stamp of the library of the Karl Marx House in Trier, an SPD institution. In the same year, 80 books of this provenance were restituted to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Since then, additional books of the same provenance have been identified; to date, a total of 104 books have been returned.

This library was newly established in Berlin in 1932/33 and confiscated immediately after the transfer of power. The books, together with other SPD holdings, had been given to the "Institute for Political Pedagogy" of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University (today the Humboldt University in Berlin). At the end of the war, they were presumably located in a cellar of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where they were discovered by the salvage office for academic libraries and taken away.

The Soviet Trophy Commission brought a large part of the books to Moscow, which were not transferred back to Trier until the 1990s. The salvage office passed on the books remaining in Berlin in 1945 to predecessor institutions of the ZLB - the Berlin City Library and the Ratsbibliothek - not without informing the SPD that it was not worthwhile to search for their property.