Bookbinders helped Nazis exploit archives to identify victims, research finds

Bookbinders and paper restorers in Nazi Germany helped the regime build a vast database used to persecute and murder Jews and others deemed racially impure, according to new research by British conservation historian Morwenna Blewett.

In her book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment, Blewett concludes that professionals tasked with repairing centuries-old church, synagogue and civil records enabled authorities to access genealogical information that became central to Nazi racial policy, The New York Times reports.

By restoring fragile documents that were often damaged or illegible when the Nazis took power in 1933, conservators made it possible for officials to trace Jewish ancestry across generations. The materials were subsequently photographed and, in some cases, forwarded to Nazi agencies.

Blewett, who began the research more than two decades ago while working as a conservation fellow at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, said she set out to understand the role of art restorers who remained in Germany during World War Two.

“How did the Nazi regime intend to use conservation and restoration to achieve its aims?” she wrote of the question that guided her inquiry.

Her findings indicate that paper restorers and bookbinders played a direct part in the regime’s effort to scrutinise the “racial” backgrounds of millions of people. The conservation of documents listing births, baptisms, marriages and deaths became, she wrote, essential to identifying those targeted under antisemitic laws.

Blewett said publishing the book was an effort to highlight what she described as “one of the longest and most insidious of all National Socialism’s projects to exploit the field of conservation and restoration.”

Her work underscores how the Nazi regime relied on a wide range of professions beyond its political leadership and security apparatus.

“It just gives us the cogs of how the regime relied on myriad professions and myriad methods in their move toward genocide,” Blewett said in a phone interview. “A move toward genocide is always piecemeal and it has to be supported by even the most obscure and niche professions.”

Under Nazi rule, restorers, like other citizens, were required to register and prove their own racial purity in order to continue working. Blewett said they were aware that the documents they restored were being used to verify ancestry.

“It was publicly known,” she said about the restoration effort, noting that individuals often sought church records themselves to demonstrate that they were not Jewish and to obtain what she described as an “Aryan pass.”

According to Blewett, many restorers prioritised extracting legible information over preserving the integrity of the original documents, departing from core conservation principles. Once restored, the records were collected and photographed by the authorities.

“Those restorers knew what they were doing,” Blewett said. “They knew it was about accumulating information to kill people.”

Christine Schmidt, acting co-director of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, said the research broadens understanding of how ordinary professions became complicit in the Holocaust.

The Nazis killed around six million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma and millions of others during their 12 years in power. Historians have long debated whether participation by ordinary citizens stemmed primarily from ideological conviction or from social pressures, fear and opportunism.

“The Holocaust was not only perpetuated by ideologues,” Schmidt said, “but also carried out through bureaucratic means.”

Blewett said the conservation programme, which ran from 1933 to 1944, was among the regime’s longest-running initiatives.

Often, she said, public memory focuses on figures such as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels and on officials in uniform.

What is less considered, she added, is “what somebody in a studio could do with a church register.”

By Aghakazim Guliyev