Between 1933 and 1945, employees of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin regularly attended auctions. Twelve different Staatliche Museen zu Berlin museums purchased over 1,700 items during this period. Around one third of these acquisitions were made at Berlin auction houses. A pilot project aims to identify the approximately 240 individuals and institutions from whose possessions these consignments originated, in order to identify art and cultural assets confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution.
Since the enactment of the “Law on the Auction Trade” in October 1934, it was mandatory to label individual consignments. The auction houses complied with the official order by encrypting the previous ownership in the auction catalogs in the form of numbers, letter combinations, abbreviations, or anonymized designations. Today, provenance researchers must decipher these cryptic codes in order to discover the names of the consignors who once owned the auctioned items. These may have been unknown private individuals of all nationalities and religions, prominent collectors, art dealerships and other companies, Nazi authorities, trustees, and cultural institutions of all kinds.
The auctions held between 1933 and 1945 contained a relatively large amount of property that Jewish people had been forced to part with as a result of Nazi persecution. Especially in the later years of Hitler's rule, auction houses were exploited as a means of disposing of abandoned and confiscated property. In many cases, entire private collections were fragmented in this way and acquired by many different museums – or, as in the case of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, by different museums within the same association. They acted independently of each other at the auctions, as each museum operated autonomously when purchasing for its collection.
This historical construct presents an opportunity that the research project aims to exploit, such as the possibility of interlinking different file holdings in the Zentralarchiv (Central Archive). Although the Museum für Islamische Kunst (Islamic Art Museum) may have communicated with the auction house about a different item than the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), which was billed for a painting after the auction, both correspondences can shed light on the same auction from different perspectives. Other synergies can arise from the collection items themselves: a porcelain cup in the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) may be free of provenance marks, while a print in the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum for Prints and Drawings) from the same consignment may bear a collector's stamp, thus revealing the previous owner from whom both lots originated.
The research findings on the consignments will be published successively in the “Information System on Auction Consignments” at “German Sales” and can thus be used directly and immediately by other museums in Germany and abroad that have acquired items from the same deciphered consignments. This new approach can make provenance research more efficient and strengthen research networks.
Institution: Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Project management and research associate: Dr. Hanna Strzoda
Research associate: Sara Sophie Biever
Project duration: November 2025 to December 2026
Project funding: Der Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media)
