Ausstellungskatalog - Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum ...

Sammeln 1910 – 2010 · Collecting 1910 – 2010
The Dahlem Catastrophe 1943 – 1945
The Second World War caused the partial destruction of the Botanic
Garden and Botanical Museum. The majority of the preserved
collections and the library burned in the night of 1 to 2 March
1943. In April 1945 the holdings cultivated in the open land
sustained severe damage, while the last collections cultivated in the
greenhouses were destroyed during the last winter of the war and
first winter following it.
This has gone down in history as the ‘Dahlem catastrophe’, the
Durch Phosphorbomben zerstörtes und ausgebranntes Treppenhaus im
Botanischen Museum,1944. BGBM, Archiv.
William Curtis, Flora Londinensis, Band 2, London 1781–1798, zerstört
im Jahre 1943. BGBM, Bibliothek.
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greatest loss that systematic botany worldwide has ever suffered.
The life’s work of generations of botanists, which were of benefit to
the whole world, had been decimated. Word of the tragedy quickly
reached Kew, which then as now was the world’s largest institution
for systematic botany, where in an internal memo Dahlem was
designated the second largest collection in the world.
Despite the ruinous state of the buildings, reconstruction work
began while the Second World War was still in progress. Furnished
with an immediate loan from the Reich Ministry for Science,
Education and Culture, employees were already travelling in 1943
to France, Belgium and Holland in order to buy up antiquarian
books. Before total collapse ensued, the rector of Vienna University
managed to send the herbarium of the Zoologisch-Botanische Gesellschaft,
which was not under his jurisdiction, to the Botanical
Museum’s storage depot in the Harz. Salvage operations and the
belated return of the collections complicated the work of the institution
in the early post-war years. HWL