Reich exchange office in the Reich Ministry of the Interior
The Reich Exchange Office in the Reich Ministry of the Interior was set up to regulate the tasks of exchanging official printed matter. The place was established in 1926. The Reichstauschstelle first had its seat in the Berlin City Palace in Portal III.
Task
The area of responsibility comprised three areas:
- 1. the processing of received applications for the purpose of accepting an exchange of printed matter,
- 2. the regulation of the distribution of collective mailings from abroad to locations in the German Reich,
- 3. The processing of transmissions from German collective mail to central offices in other countries outside the German Reich.
Initially, there were monthly mailings of printed matter abroad, namely to Australia, Belgium, British Honduras, Bulgaria, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Romania , Spain, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Expansion of the area of responsibility from 1927 to 1934
As early as 1927, the tasks of the Reich Exchange Office were expanded to include the exchange of printed matter in the Reich libraries by a decree of February 27 (RMinBl. P. 59). Books that are duplicated in the libraries should be distributed to other libraries and the dissolved holdings should also be taken over from libraries.
In 1934 the Reichstauschstelle was moved to the house of the Prussian State Library in Unter den Linden . The responsible manager was Hugo Andres Krüß . The deputy until 1945 was Gisela von Busse . She took over the management after 1945. In a decree from 1937, the Reich Ministry of Justice regulated that books and other printed matter no longer needed should be removed from the holdings of the judicial authorities, with the Reich Exchange Office taking over this task. After the occupation of Austria by the Wehrmacht in March 1938, the International Exchange Office of the National Library in Vienna was dissolved. From June 1939, the Reich Exchange Agency had to take over the tasks of this dissolved institution.
Tasks in World War II
The Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture commissioned in 1943 the Reichstauschstelle with the tasks of destroyed to rebuild libraries were connected. For this purpose, the opportunities were used to buy double editions of printed matter. These activities also extended to the areas that the German Wehrmacht conquered and held. In France, for example, all of the publishers' stocks of French books were acquired. Until 2007, research did not clarify the extent to which these acquisitions were legally processed or whether some of them were stolen property.
With the beginning of the war, the tasks of the Reich Exchange Agency had increased considerably in scope. For example, 50 employees moved the state library's holdings of three million books from 1941 to 30 locations in the German Reich. The Reichstauschstelle itself administered 40 storage locations, which not only extended to the German Reich, but were also available in Milan, Brno, Turin and Strasbourg.
Legal relationships
About a million books were transported to the Reichstauschstelle from occupied countries. After 1945, the tasks of the Reich Exchange Office in the eastern part of Berlin were again taken over by the State Library, which was now called the Public Scientific Library . Many files and other documents from the Reich Exchange Office were also stored in the GDR . Research into the origin and legal relationships of the holdings allocated by the Reich Exchange Agency only began in 2006.
literature
- Cornelia Briel: The book storage of the Reichstauschstelle , with a foreword by Georg Ruppelt , Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016 ( Journal of Libraries and Bibliography: Special Volumes ; 117), ISBN 978-3-465-04249-5
- Nazi looted property, Reichstauschstelle and Prussian State Library: Lectures at the Berlin Symposium on May 3rd and 4th, 2007 , ed. by Hans Erich Bödeker u. Gerd-Josef Bötte. Munich: Saur, 2008. ISBN 3-598-11777-9 , ISBN 978-3-598-11777-0 .
- The German Reich from 1918 to today , ed. by Cuno Horkenbach with objective support from the Reich authorities, parliamentarians and journalists, parties, corporations and associations. - Berlin: Verl. Für Presse, Wirtschaft und Politik, 1930–1935, 4 vols.
- Michael Sontheimer : Mute witnesses . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 2008, p. 58 ( online - October 20, 2008 ).