Julius Riemer

Julius Riemer (4 April 1880 – 17 November 1958) was a German factory owner, businessman, founder of the Wittenberg Castle Museum and a collector of natural history and ethnographic artifacts.

Riemer was the oldest child in the family of a Berlin industrialist. A visit to the natural history museum in Berlin as a nine-year old with his grandfather fascinated him and he began to collect specimens. His interests overshadowed his studies and he did not do well in school. He took over the factory of his father and produced leather gloves, the largest such industry in Germany in the 1940s. On business trips he also collected items from other dealers and through collectors. He received more than 1000 ethnological artefacts from Africa through the zoologist Eugen Hintz. His collections included fossils, minerals, feathers, skulls, insects, shells and his private museum grew large. During World War II, air raids made him move his collections to his home in Sieversdorf and he rented barns of farmers and others to hide his collections but at least a third of it was destroyed.[1]

During the third Reich, Riemer was interested in caves and speleology. As a friend of Dr Benno Wolf, he was approached by the Gestapo to prevent the latter from destroying his life-long work with building a database on caves. Wolf was born in a Jewish family but had converted to Protestant Christianity but was nevertheless removed from his official positions and arrested. Reimer took over Wolf's collections and manuscripts and bequeathed these materials to the Nuremberg Natural History Society in April 1947. Riemer also came in possession of the bird collections of Oscar Neumann, whom he helped escape to Cuba. Riemer was in contact with the Nazi leadership and was involved in denouncing Jews, and anti Semism. Heinrich Himmler had appointed him as "Landesgruppenleiter Reich-Mitte", head of the association for cave specialists as well as head of propaganda.[2][1] Other researchers have found evidence where Riemer was classified as "politically reliable" by the Nazis.[3]

Riemer was a member of several scholarly associations. At the suggestion of Otto Kleinschmidt, he founded a museum for natural history and ethnology in Wittenberg Castle in 1947. The museum was opened in 1949. It was closed in 2011 and reopened in 2018 on the initiative of the Friends of the Julius Riemer Collection with scientific advice from Nils Seethaler.[1]

Riemer married three times; his divorced his first wife Luzie in the 1930s while his second wife Hedwig died in 1945. In 1947 he married his godchild, museologist Charlotte Mathieu.[1]