Provenance research analyzes the origin of cultural and art objects. Research into Nazi-looted property deals with works of art and books that were unlawfully seized from their owners during the National Socialist era. This concerns both persecuted institutions and persecuted private individuals. The political background to provenance research is the Washington Principles, which were defined at an international conference in 1998. 44 states and non-governmental organizations formulated the goal of identifying and documenting looted cultural objects and striving for fair solutions for their restitution.

The two-year project at the ULB is funded by the German Lost Art Foundation. The subject of the study is the library's newly formed holdings between 1945 and 1949. The selected holdings contain literature that was secreted and banned during the Nazi era and was preserved in the largely destroyed library after the bombing of Darmstadt in 1944. The corpus also includes books that were collected from various sources after the war for the rapid reconstruction of the library. So-called “secondary looted property” entered the collection in a roundabout way after 1945.

The project team is examining around 40,000 titles by autopsy for provenance features such as autographs, bookplates, stamps and notes. This is followed by a search for previous owners, particularly in archive databases, and the signatures of suspicious cases or proven cases of looted property are compared with the entries in the library's surviving accession books. In this way, acquisition structures can be researched and reconstructed as far as possible. The findings are documented in the online catalog and presented to the public in articles and lectures.

The results of the project will be used to prepare restitutions to previous owners, their heirs or legal successors and to find “just and fair solutions” in accordance with the Washington Principles.