How Bookbinders Helped the Nazis Track Holocaust Victims

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s used their craft to help the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure. Key to building this database were church, civil and synagogue records, which were often hundreds of years old and damaged beyond legibility when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

The findings are the result of more than two decades of work by Morwenna Blewett. While a conservation fellow at the Worcester Art Museum in 2004 she began asking what had happened to art restorers who did not flee Nazi Germany, a question that expanded into the book published this month, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment.

Blewett found that restorers were tasked with cleaning and conserving registers of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths so their contents could be read.

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