Obermayer Award

“It was an absence rather than a presence.”

For Anneke de Rudder, returning stolen objects is about reconnecting families

by Toby Axelrod

Voids cannot be seen, but sensed. Anneke de Rudder has the empathy to recognize empty spaces in Germany where Jewish life once flourished. And she has dedicated herself to reconnecting people to their own history and filling in those voids, at least symbolically.

Thanks in large part to her efforts, descendants of a prominent German Jewish family found each other across the world. And that rediscovery also has impacted the German town where their common ancestor once lived, and where de Rudder herself grew up: Lüneburg, near Hamburg.

De Rudder is one of those fortunate few whose profession and volunteering overlap.

As a provenance researcher for the Hamburg State and University Library since 2018, she helps restore items obtained unlawfully during the Nazi period, such as letters, book collections, or autographs from famous writers, to their rightful heirs. She previously did the same for the Museum Lüneburg. She also has helped develop exhibits on topics related to the Nazi past for museums across Germany, and has done research for Yad Vashem in Israel.

In all, she has been working in the field for 27 years now.

Meanwhile, largely on her own time, she has delved into the history of Jews in Lower Saxony. Her latest project is a website and database about the history of Jewish life in Lüneburg. It went online November 9, 2023, the 85th anniversary of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany.

Eventually, it will contain names, dates, photographs, documents, and stories of some 800 individuals, from the 17th century to the 1950s. She is partnering with the Museum Lüneburg, the Christian-Jewish Society, and the History Workshop. She describes the site as “a modern, open, and constantly changing platform for remembrance, sharing knowledge, and telling stories, and for bringing together the descendants of Jewish Lüneburg families all over the world with those living in the town today.”

Helping To Fill the Void 

De Rudder’s passion goes well beyond documenting objects. It has taken her on hunts for genealogical clues and led her to descendants of families with ties to prewar Germany. Their encounters have changed many lives. 

“She helped our family learn about our German family history,” says Becki Cohn-Vargas, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Now, she is a friend.”

De Rudder’s interest in this chapter of history began early on.

As a student in Berlin, she couldn’t help “noticing that something is missing.”

Jews “used to live there and they used to work there. You knew they were part of something that was very good, [yet] they were no longer there,” she says. “When I walked through the streets of Berlin, I was aware of the past, but not everybody necessarily would be because it was an absence rather than a presence.”

Her quest to fill in the blanks led her to study the lives of Jewish exiles who revisited postwar Germany as new citizens of the United States or England, and who helped shape the future in their former homeland. Germany was lucky to have had allies “who really were concerned about how to prevent this from happening again,” she says.

Her interest in American history led to her master’s thesis at Berlin’s Free University. It compared reactions in the U.S. and in Germany to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, drawing on observations of journalists.

After her studies, she conducted freelance research in Germany for Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. She then worked at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp memorial outside Berlin, as part of a group developing a permanent exhibit about Jewish prisoners. She and other young researchers were sent to Israel, where they interviewed survivors and made personal connections with them. The trip was formative and launched her career as a public historian and, ultimately, a provenance researcher.

Eventually, de Rudder moved back to the countryside near Lüneburg and started a family, taking on temporary jobs in her field with a focus on regional history during the Nazi period. This is how she got in touch with the Lüneburg Museum, which wanted to include the Nazi era in its new permanent exhibit.

The museum also prepared a provenance research project. In 2012, local historian Hans-Jürgen Brennecke had started to put pressure on the museum to search for looted goods in their collections. He had found the record of an auction in 1940, documenting how items belonging to the local Jewish family of banker Marcus Heinemann (1819-1908) were forcefully auctioned off after most of his descendants had fled into exile. The museum had purchased some of the items, and a few — a family Bible, a beautifully carved 14th-century wooden chest, historic furniture, and some Lüneburg collectibles — were still there, having survived the wartime air raids. In 2014, de Rudder started to look into this, as part of a larger provenance research project at the museum.

“It was a clear-cut case of Nazi-looted goods,” de Rudder says about the Heinemann items. “The museum didn't go to the auction, but they contacted the person in charge of the estate. And they said, ‘We want to have some objects for the museum. They shouldn't go into the auction.’”

Searching for Heirs

De Rudder set about trying to locate descendants of Marcus and Henriette Heinemann, who had had 17 children, of whom 13 reached adulthood. Marcus also had two siblings, who had children as well.

Through an obituary of one of their granddaughters in America, de Rudder found the American educator and author Becki Cohn-Vargas, a great-great granddaughter of Marcus and Henriette. She sent an email to Cohn-Vargas, and the two connected. 

“I instantly partnered with Anneke,” Cohn-Vargas recalls. Across an ocean and a continent, they worked together to find more family descendants. It wasn’t so much about restitution, she says. “The items weren't extremely valuable. And there were so many people! It became a different kind of journey, finding people.”

Together they located 60 other family members, in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, and even in Germany. Cohn-Vargas says she was amazed and moved to learn about her far-flung relatives. “Hitler tried to wipe out all of us, and look at where the ones who survived are living, and what they're doing in the world!” she says.

De Rudder says she contacted as many as she could reach, to inform them about the items in the collection: "We found this. We think it belongs to you. We stole it, basically. And now we want to return it to you because you're the rightful heirs."

The reconnected heirs decided to accept the restitution and to loan the items back to the museum. In 2015, 40 Heinemann family members came to Lüneburg for a reunion and restitution ceremony organized by de Rudder, with help from Cohn-Vargas, Kristina Heinemann of New York, Naomi Raz of Israel and, above all, Ruth Verroen of Marburg, Germany. At the event, the chairman of the Museum Association, the Lüneburg mayor, and other leaders apologized for the brutal treatment of their ancestors. A hall at the museum was renamed after Marcus Heinemann.

The guests saw the apartment where Marcus and Henriette Heinemann had lived, and visited an artist’s studio that had once housed the local synagogue. A rabbi was invited to lead a service in honor of the Heinemann family members who had been murdered by the Nazis.

“Anneke created a family tree on the museum wall,” says Ruth Verroen, “illustrated with photographs of family members,” most of whom Verroen had never heard of before. “Thanks to her, some of us have become close friends…. She built bridges from our ancestors to our present lives, and revived the memory of those family members who couldn’t escape, and were murdered by Nazi terror.”

De Rudder has helped reconnect other Jewish families with their German history, sometimes through restituted objects. Before working at the Hamburg State Library, she discovered an unsolved case on their website, a Nazi-looted Jewish prayerbook that had belonged to Theodor Philipp, a 19th-century teacher in the Lüneburg Jewish community. She located heirs and facilitated the book's return to the family. She has also tried to support individuals who want to return objects to their lawful owners. In 2022, a woman from Cologne revealed that she had a vase that once belonged to a Jewish family. De Rudder helped her to find the heirs.

Over the decades, there has been a societal shift, and many of the voids that de Rudder sensed as a young woman have been filled with memories, with new connections, with memorials. Not only have individuals pursued family and local history, some German institutions and corporations have also opened their archives, hired historians and, to varying degrees, laid bare their wartime history.

“Part of my job now is working in institutions that have done something bad in the past,” de Rudder explains. “And today, I think most of these institutions don't have problems dealing with that anymore. They're acknowledging that.”

Despite all the public remembrance work, some Germans still avoid the personal angle, she says. “They’re like, ‘Yes, so many awful things happened,’ but they don't want to really face what it meant specifically. They say, ‘Ah, I don't really want a stumbling stone memorial in front of my house. Why do I have to recognize that it actually happened here?’”

She used to be depressed about this, though “sometimes I think there's hope.” After all, many people have come to her talks and museum tours about Lüneburg Jewish history, and some are eager to learn more.

In partnership with descendants and with numerous institutions, de Rudder has helped rebuild connections with the past, step by step.

“It is as if Anneke revived the Jewish legacy of Lüneberg, as far as possible,” says Naomi Raz,. 

“This new knowledge of family history has been transformative in my life,” says New York resident Kristina Heinemann, recalling how she sat with de Rudder in 2018 as de Rudder translated a diary and memoir by one of Marcus Heinemann’s daughters. Together, they heard her words of “sorrow and despair over the treatment of the Jews in Lüneburg: ‘What would Papa think now? How sad would he be about what is happening to the Jews.’” 

“I had grown up knowing only a few surviving relatives of my Jewish family and assuming that all the others had perished in the Holocaust,” says Ruth March of England. “Now I have a large, diverse family to celebrate and explore.” 

 “Working with Anneke not only brought me together with my family,” Cohn-Vargas says, “it also reconnected me with German people who, like myself, are devoted to fighting bigotry and also recognizing history.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024