La Liberté, Ghent

In 2025, a book from the library of the masonic lodge La Liberté was restituted to the documentation centre Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Maçonnique | Maçonniek Studie- en Documentatiecentrum (CEDOM-MADOC).

The francophone lodge La Liberté was founded in Ghent in 1865/1866 by a group of progressive liberal members who had split from the older Ghent lodge ‘Septentrion’.

Like all Masonic property in Belgium, the lodge's property was confiscated and seized from 1940 onwards by Nazi organisations such as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), the Sonderkommando Künsberg and the military library protection unit (Bibliotheksschutz des Militärs).

La Liberté was re-established after the end of the war. After 1945, looted archive material from various Belgian lodges, including La Liberté and Les Vrais Amis de l'Union et du Progrès Réunis, was taken from Berlin to Moscow by the Soviet trophy commission.

In 2002, this material was returned to Belgium, and the various Belgian lodges decided to hand it over in its entirety to CEDOM-MADOC, which had been founded in 1968 by the Grand Orient de Belgique.

The book in question was identified in unprocessed stock of the Berlin City Library (BStB) and was never incorporated into the library's inventory. It was demonstrably acquired after the end of the war in 1945 via the Salvage Office for Scientific Libraries, salvage order ‘15’ (‘Library of the SS Reich Main Security Office’).

The RSHA had amassed looted books from all over Europe in a confiscated lodge building at Eisenacher Str. 11-13 in Berlin Schöneberg. After the end of the war in 1945, some of these books were distributed by the Salvage Office to libraries in Berlin, in particular to the BStB.

The ZLB would like to thank Michel Vermote for his extraordinary support in this restitution.