Wolfenbüttel, 3 February 2025
Despite his conversion to Catholicism, Moriz Ritter von Grünebaum was subjected to anti-Semitic persecution by the Nazi regime following the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in March 1938. In October 1940 he was forcibly resettled and sent to live with his sister, Margarethe Fürth. In 1941 Grünebaum, Margarethe Fürth and her daughter, Wilhelmine Elisabeth Fürth, were compelled to move into a ‘collective’ apartment at Herminengasse 16 in Vienna.
In preparation for his forced resettlement, Grünebaum, a passionate collector of ex libris, graphics and books, had to put his large collection into storage with the shipping company J. Z. Dworak junior in autumn 1940. After liberation, Dworak, whose name appears in connection with other cases of Jewish assets lost as a result of Nazi persecution, was criminally prosecuted – for, among other offences, misappropriation of the holdings stored with him between 1943 and 1945.
In August 1942 Moriz Grünebaum was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he died on 21 December 1942 at the age of 69. Nothing is known about what happened to his collection after that. Between 1948 and 1957 a succession of works formerly owned by Grünebaum surfaced among Vienna art dealers. It is no longer possible to reconstruct when and how they found their way onto the market.
The three-volume edition of Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker entered the HAB holdings in 1985 as part of the library of the composer and university lecturer Ernst Pepping (1901–1981). Pepping’s role under the Nazis has been classified as ambiguous. While he maintained that he had amassed his collection of some 2,300 historical editions of German and European literature in the post-war period, it cannot be ruled out that he also acquired some volumes during the Nazi era.
The provenance of the volumes that belonged to Moriz Grünebaum is being investigated as part of the project ‘Assets looted by the Nazis among the Herzog August Bibliothek’s accessions made between 1933 and 1969’, funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation). Since the HAB has been able to confirm that these holdings were misappropriated as a consequence of Nazi persecution, it has now restituted them to Grünebaum’s rightful heirs.
Illustration: Moriz Grünebaum’s ex libris, which allowed the history of its ownership to be reconstructed
