The Berliner Stadtbibliothek accession register has a very special entry for 13 August 1951: "Eine beschlagnahmte Bibliothek 1028 Bände" (i.e., a confiscated library 1,028 volumes).

It is not known by whom the library was confiscated. According to the current state of research, this was a batch of books obtained by Berliner Stadtbibliothek from the Berlin Magistrate.

In addition to unsuspicious books, this collection contains both Nazi loot and so-called GDR/SBZ loot, property that was confiscated from those who migrated to the West illegally as "deserters from the republic" ("Republikflüchtlinge") after 1945.

Alfred Weiland (1906–1978) grew up in Moabit, a working-class district of Berlin. In addition to working as a locksmith and telegraph operator, he was also active as a journalist for the Council Communist press. He was a member of the radical left-wing Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) as well as the General Workers' Union (AAU), and after the Nazi "seizure of control" in 1933, he was sent to so-called "protective custody" in the Hohnstein concentration camp until 1934.

In the 1940s, he joined the underground resistance organization around Carl Goerdeler and Julius Leber and the group around Anton Saefkow. In 1944, Weiland narrowly escaped arrest by joining the Wehrmacht.

After the end of World War II, he began to set up an illegal "Group of International Socialists" and was under observation by the Soviet secret service and the SED counterintelligence apparatus from 1945. On 11 November 1950, he was kidnapped from the street in West Berlin by Soviet intelligence and taken to the Soviet MGB prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. In 1952, despite his retraction of "confessions about espionage activities" extorted under torture, the Greifswald Regional Court sentenced Weiland to 15 years in prison for "boycott and warmongering" in secret trial. After his early release in 1958, he lived in West Berlin and became involved with the persecuted in socialist states. He became a member of the SPD. Alfred Weiland died in West Berlin in 1978.

Even as a young man, Weiland assembled a rich collection of political writings of about 1,500 volumes, which was confiscated by the Nazis when he was arrested in 1933. After his release, he managed to compile a new library, but it was partially destroyed in an apartment fire in November 1943.
From June 1945 to February 1946, Weiland participated in inspecting and collating the looted books that had been amassed by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) libraries at Eisenacher Strasse 11–13 in Berlin at a recovery bureau for academic libraries (Bergungsstelle für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken). Approximately 60,000 volumes were stored there in the basement of the former Masonic Lodge headquarters building, all of them looted by various Nazi organizations, such as the RSHA. Several hundred volumes from the Bergungsstelle are considered the basic stock of Weiland's collection; many of the books show signs that indicate that they had belonged to persecuted persons and organizations.

In 1979, the Freie Universität Berlin University Library acquired Alfred Weiland's library. It is a special collection on socialism and the labor movement of about 6,000 volumes.
Numerous books from this collection have been identified as looted property and have been restituted to their rightful owners.

The collection of almost 150 volumes sold to Freie Universität Berlin University Library between 1954 and 1956 had belonged to librarian and translator Felix Loesch (1886–1964). Many of the volumes contain indications that they were looted.

Exlibris of the Jewish journalist, art historian and author Lothar Brieger-Wasservogel (1879–1949):

"I have a definite feeling that, after this age of barbarism, destruction, and spiritual devastation, we can expect to see, and not even so long from now, an age of cultural coming-to-senses and restoration of the arts. Particularly for all creative forces, the end of emigration signifies a new beginning, which we are all waiting and hoping for."

Lothar Brieger
in: The Shanghai Herald, supplement 37, 18
7 April, 1946

In 1933, Brieger emigrated to Shanghai, China, without his wife Martha. Shanghai was one of the last cities in the world to accept Jewish refugees. Brieger ran an antique store there and did some writing for the exile newspaper "Shanghai Herald" and other publications. After the end of the war, he lived briefly in Italy and returned to Berlin in 1947, where he died in 1949.

The private library of theologian Prof. Dr. Helmut Gollwitzer (1908–1993) was acquired by Freie Universität after his death, and it is now part of the University Library special collections.
Prof. Dr. Helmut Gollwitzer, who was considered a prominent pupil of Karl Barth's, was committed against Nazism. In September 1940, Gollwitzer was banned from speaking publicly ("Reichsredeverbot") for activities detrimental to the state and was expelled from Berlin.
At the end of the year, at the urging of friends in the military, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht to escape the grasp of the Gestapo, where he served as a medic on the Eastern Front. In 1945, he became a Soviet prisoner of war and in 1952 wrote a book about his experiences there, which became a bestseller.

The German President at the time, Theodor Heuss, praised his book as a "great historical document."
Helmut Gollwitzer was a close friend of Gustav Heinemann's, the third President of the Federal Republic of Germany and a fatherly advisor to Rudi Dutschke.

Wolfgang Keiper was an antiquarian bookseller and publisher. The remainders of his stocks, the Keiper Collection, were kept at Ehrenbergstraße 35, where the Institute for Eastern European Studies was housed at the time. The approximately 23,000 volumes, mostly by German authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, were acquired by Freie Universität Berlin for the University Library in November 1952.

Dr Fritz Elsas (1890–1941) came from a Jewish industrialist family. He was one of the most important German municipal politicians of his time. From 1931, he was deputy mayor of Berlin. His tenure ended abruptly in the spring of 1933 when he was dismissed by the Nazis. Fritz Elsas, as a liberal, was involved in the resistance group around Ernst Strassmann. After the failed attempt of assassination on Adolf Hitler in July 1944, he hid Carl Friedrich Goerdeler.
In 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and shot dead there in 1945.