Photograph of Offenbach Archival Depot
Photograph of Offenbach Archival Depot
Photo album
Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955: U.S. Zone)
The Offenbach Archival Depot, located in the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main in the American sector of occupied Germany, was established in March 1946. It was among the central collection points for assessment and documenting the Nazis’ massive, systematic plunder of Jewish private and institutional library and archival, museum and art collections in Europe initiated and overseen by the notorious Nazis’ Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).
The Offenbach Depot’s primary focus was on documents and books; it was one of several temporary locations across central Europe that the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program (MFAA) set up. The Allies founded the program in 1943, in the midst of the war, and its workers became known as the Monuments Men. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, repositories like the Offenbach Depot assembled and processed materials from more than 1,500 hidden caches where Nazis had stored their stolen treasures.
More than three million books went through the Offenbach Archival Depot between 1946 and 1949. Photographs like this one, part of the Offenbach photographic history albums housed at the Library and covering a period from March to November 1946, documented everyday activities at the depot. They are complemented by two volumes of the book markings of former owners and an album of photographs of the looted treasures from the synagogues, which are also in possession of the Library. Together, they provide a valuable glimpse into understanding the painstaking processes of recovery, inspection, sorting, and distribution of plundered Jewish heritage in the immediate aftermath of the tragedies, and at the very beginning of the cultural reconstruction.
The image on display captures the General Sorting Room, where the supervised denazified German citizens separated the books according to the library markings. Thirty thousand books could be processed in this chamber daily.
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