It's long been known that Nazis used church, synagogue, and civil records to identify Jewish people. What has been far less known is bookbinders' and restorers' role in that effort. The New York Times reports on research by Morwenna Blewett, a conservation historian whose new book argues that paper conservators and bookbinders in Nazi Germany helped enable the Holocaust by restoring crumbling records the regime then turned into a vast tracking system.
Within Nazi archives, Blewett says she found "official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents." One Nazi official flagged the importance of German church books, "which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes [and] are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy." By cleaning and repairing centuries-old registers listing births, marriages, and deaths, these professionals made millions of entries legible—data the Nazis used to verify ancestry and target those they considered "racially impure."
Blewett's book, based on more than 20 years of research, shows restorers often set aside core conservation ethics in the course of their work. For instance, the Guardian reports Blewett found they would soak pages with glycerin to make them more readable, despite that reducing the integrity of the paper; the priority was extracting names and dates, not preserving artifacts. The project ran from 1933 to 1944, making it one of the Nazi's longest-running efforts, she argues. She says her findings make clear that "a move toward genocide is always piecemeal and it has to be supported by even the most obscure and niche professions," she tells the Times.
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