Provenance Research :

Museum zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, Laupheim (Laupheim Museum on the History of Christians and Jews)

Museum
Museum zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, Laupheim (Laupheim Museum on the History of Christians and Jews)

Research into Nazi-confiscated cultural property in the museum's collection
In 1994 the Laupheim museum of local history was re-organised and re-named the Museum on the History of Christians and Jews. Laupheim had been one of the largest Jewish communities of Württemberg and the museum's first project in 1994 was to document the history of the rural Jewish community of the Laupheim region and its destruction under National Socialism, In the course of their search of the existing collection, staff found a Viennese Biedermeier clock of unclear provenance rumoured to have belonged to a local Jewish resident. It was known that the clock had been given to an inhabitant of Laupheim by a Jewish man from Ulm, prior to his deportation, and that after the war it had been handed over to the museum. Following the find of a photograph showing the clock in a room of the Jewish old people's home in Laupheim which existed from 1939-1942, and a personal contact made by a member of staff with emigrants from the Jewish community of Ulm who live in London, the owner's descendants were identified. The museum offered to return the object. However, the heirs decided that it should remain on display at the museum in memory of their family members who had died in the Holocaust.

Contact Details
Museum zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, Laupheim
Schloss Großlaupheim
Kirchberg 11
88471 Laupheim
Tel: +49 (0) 7392 968000
Fax: +49 (0) 7392 9680018
Email: kultur-laupheim@t-online.de
http://members.aol.com/laupheim/museum/index.htm

Source
Myrah Adams/Benigna Schönhagen, 'Im Museumsdepot - Ein Erinnerungsstück an die ermordeten Eltern'; in Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste (ed.), Beiträge öffentlicher Einrichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus ehemaligem jüdischen Besitz (Magdeburg: Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste, 2001), 194-201. Text in German, summary in English

<http://members.aol.com/laupheim/museum/index.htm>, accessed 16 December 2002