Julius Riemer

Julius Riemer (April 4, 1880 – November 17, 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. His death in a concentration camp was only determined after the war. 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 but he claimed not to be further involved however archival documents note that in 1941 Heinrich Himmler had appointed him as "Landesgruppenleiter Reich-Mitte", head of the association for cave specialists as well as head of propaganda. He was also a member of Hermann Göring's society for the conservation of the European bison. Riemer signed several of his letters with "Heil Hitler".[2][1] Other researchers have found contradictory evidence where Riemer was classified as "politically unreliable" by the Nazis.[3]

Riemer was a member of several learned societies. In 1947, following a suggestion from Otto Kleinschmidt two years earlier, he set up a museum of nature and ethnology at Wittenberg Castle. The museum was opened in 1949. It closed in 2011 and was reopened on the initiative of the Julius Riemer Circle of Friends (Freundeskreis Julius-Riemer-Sammlung) in 2018.[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]