17 March 1944
17 March 1944
In an effort to spare the Institute’s library from destruction amid air raids on Berlin, two fellows at the Institute, Hans Rupp and Konrad Zweigert, send the whole collection to Tübingen, where the Institute is provisionally quartered in a fraternity house. The decision to evacuate from Berlin turns out to be a prescient one: the Berlin Palace was heavily damaged in a bombing raid in February 1945. After the war, the Institute successfully re-establishes itself in international legal scholarship. It joins the newly constituted Max Planck Society in 1949.
The year is 1943. Ernst Heymann is long hesitant to move the Institute’s operations out of the capital even as air raids on Berlin are intensifying. Eventually, in 1944, Institute fellows Hans Rupp and Konrad Zweigert seize the initiative and transfer the Institute’s library to Tübingen, where the collection, then totalling about 90,000 volumes, occupies several floors of a former fraternity house and overflows into a storage area. The library survives the rest of the war unscathed.
Konrad Zweigert (1911–1996) joined the Institute as an assistant in 1937 and becomes a research fellow shortly thereafter. He is responsible for the legal systems of Romance-language countries as well as a new section on the law of the reserve-currency system. He also supervises the writing of expert opinions. It is thanks to him and Hans Rupp that the Institute law library is saved. Zweigert will later become Institute director.
Hans Georg Rupp (1907–1989) worked in the legal department of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG before joining the Institute in 1938 as a research fellow for North America. He and Konrad Zweigert organize the successful effort to save the Institute law library. Rupp turns to contacts with his former employer, I.G. Farben, to arrange for trucks to transport the collection from Berlin to Tübingen.
On 17 March 1944, the first truckload carrying 62 crates of books leaves for Tübingen in a bid to protect the law library from Allied air raids targeting the Berlin Palace. In a building known as the “Swabian House” in downtown Tübingen, the collection will be safe until the end of the war.
© Rabe!, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The next year, the Berlin Palace is destroyed. Staff members who were still in Berlin are evacuated to Tübingen, where, in a temporary arrangement, they are spread out across six different buildings. Ernst Heymann is by this time gravely ill and is serving as director only in a diminished capacity. He dies on 2 May 1946 and is succeeded by Hans Dölle, who had already assumed many leadership duties the previous year. Dölle had been a professor at the University of Strasbourg, a so-called “University of the Reich” that was supposed to embody the ideal national socialist university. He was also a member of the Nazi party.
In 1949, the Institute joins the newly-formed Max Planck Society and is renamed the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. The same year, The Journal of Comparative and International Private Law publishes its first issue after a seven-year hiatus. The series Materialien zum ausländischen und internationalen Privatrecht is restarted in 1951.
