Exclusive: Research uncovers programme to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry
Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.
A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide programme in the 1930s and 1940s in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.
Dr Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.
In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.
