400-Year-Old Books Return to Germany
Sixty-four years after the war’s end, two 16th-century books are being returned to Germany. An American soldier serving in Germany had taken them with him in April 1945. On October 6 in Washington, DC, he turned the two works over to German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth.
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- Ambassador Klaus Scharioth receives the books from US veteran Robert Thomas.
- (© dpa - Report)
The legal texts, written in German and Latin, had been stored in a Hessian salt mine for safe-keeping before the Allied bombing attacks in 1944. They were stored there with the inventories of the Prussian State Library and costumes and music scores of the Berlin State Opera House.
The US veteran Robert Thomas, who was an 18-year-old soldier at the time, had discovered one of the salt mine’s tunnels in the Hessian town of Ransbach and took the two books back with him to America as a souvenir.
Symbol of Reconciliation
Now, more than 60 years later, he has returned the works to Germany, with the help of the U.S. National Archives. Ambassador Scharioth praised the return as a gesture of mutual understanding and reconciliation. That valuable cultural property is still being returned to Germany so many years after the war gives cause for hope, the ambassador said.
The books will now be brought back to Germany, where they are to be returned to the owners. The first work, a legal commentary written in Latin in 1583, originates from the former Diocesan Library of Höxter, which later became the Archiepiscopal Diocesan Museum in Paderborn. The second work, the Manorial Court Order of the Duchy of Prussia, written in 1578, is from the library of the Prussian government director Arnold Wilhelm Elbers (died 1807), which in 1829 went to the Bonn University Library, where it will now be returned.
