How Bookbinders Used Old Records to Help the Nazis Find Their Victims

Interesting research and wonder whether any of those involved had a sense of how their work would be used or was it more a case of wilful blindness and complicity:

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s used their craft to help the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.

Key to building this database were church, civil and synagogue records, which were often hundreds of years old and damaged beyond legibility when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

By tasking professionals with cleaning up these documents, which held information about millions of people, the Nazis gained access to generations’ worth of material — which they used to target specific population groups, the new research shows.

The findings are the result of more than two decades of work by Morwenna Blewett, an expert in conservation history.

She was working as a conservation fellow at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2004 when a question came to her: What had happened to the art restorers who did not flee Nazi Germany during World War II?

She pondered the question while sorting through an old filing cabinet in the museum’s basement — where, as she recalled in a book published this month, “Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment,” the “warm, dark air smelt faintly of cigarettes, coffee and engine oil.”

Soon, she had expanded on her query: “How did the Nazi regime intend to use conservation and restoration to achieve its aims?”

The answer, she discovered, was that paper restorers and bookbinders in Nazi Germany had helped the regime track down people’s Jewish ancestry by conserving and cleaning up old records from churches, as well as from synagogues and civil registers.

Dr. Blewett said that, by publishing her book, she hoped to shed light on this part of the Holocaust, which she called “one of the longest and most insidious of all National Socialism’s projects to exploit the field of conservation and restoration.”…

Source: How Bookbinders Used Old Records to Help the Nazis Find Their Victims