Latvijas Republikas Saeima, Biblioteka

In 2025, two books from Latvijas Republikas Saeima, Biblioteka were returned to the Latvian Parliamentary Library.

Based on the stamp in the books and the associated catalog number “Kr. Kat. H 5242”, which can be found in one of the volumes, the books could be clearly assigned to the Latvijas Republika Saeima Biblioteka (Parliamentary Library of the Republic of Latvia).

The library of the Latvian parliament in Riga, the Latvijas Republikas Saeima Biblioteka, was looted during the German occupation of Latvia from 1941 to 1944. Parts of the collection were taken to Germany as so-called plunder.

After the end of World War I, Latvia declared its independence on November 18, 1918. This was followed by the Latvian War of Independence, which ended on August 11, 1920 with the peace agreement with Soviet Russia. In the course of the election of the House of Representatives of independent Latvia, a library committee was formed on June 9, 1920. The library that had been established up until then was continued as the Parliamentary Library (Saeima) following the consultation of the First Latvian Parliament.  The library existed until the dissolution of the Latvian Parliament on May 15, 1934.

In December 1992, on behalf of the Federal Minister of the Interior, Rudolf Seiters, the German Library in Frankfurt restituted 27 boxes of books that had been transferred to Germany during the German occupation of Latvia to the Latvian National Library in Riga. These included three boxes of materials from the Saeima in Riga.

Research revealed that some of the books had been stored in the RSHA depot. The RSHA library was located in the former lodge building at Eisenacher Straße 11-13 in Berlin-Schöneberg. Millions of books from libraries looted by the National Socialists in Germany and Europe were collected there. The National Socialist rulers planned to build an “enemy library” with the Nazi looted and looted property. The exact route taken by the books from the Latvian parliamentary library to the RSHA is still unknown. The Latvian book collections and other Latvian cultural assets were presumably transferred to Germany by the National Socialists on the orders of Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) in the summer of 1944. Sylvia Kubina suspects that the RSHA depot may have been a temporary storage facility for the Latvian books, as war-related removals of library collections had already been taking place in Berlin since 1943.

One of the two volumes bears the stamp of the “Bücherei der Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer für das Ostland” (HSSPF). This was an organ of the Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO), which was set up during the Second World War after the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German Reich in June 1941. The staff offices of the Higher SS and Police Leaders took over the civil administration in the occupied territories. The RKO was under the direction of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, headed by Alfred Rosenberg. The volume with the shelfmark “Ua 311” was therefore part of the HSSPF library for a period that can no longer be precisely determined.

The book identified in the ZLB holdings with the shelfmark “Bb 298” could not be clearly assigned to the former holdings of the RSHA. This is only possible for the second volume with the shelfmark “Ua 311” on the basis of the salvage point number “15” it contains. According to previous findings and the SeBi accession book, it can be assumed that the Schöneberg administrative library had supplemented its holdings with books from the salvage center for scientific libraries 101 (Herrenlose Bestände des Volksbildungsamtes Schöneberg) after the end of the Second World War.

Sources

• Kubina, Sylvia (1995): Die Bibliothek des Rätekommunisten Alfred Weiland (1906–1978), Veröffentlichungen der Freien Universität Berlin, hier Band 4. Berlin: Universitätsbbliothek der Freien Universität Berlin, S. 88 f.
• Seibert, Sebastian (2023): Die Bibliothek des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes und der Kulturgutraub in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Berliner Handreichungen zur Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft, hier Heft 515, hrsg. Von Vivien Petras. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.