Tracings of a collection of prehistoric objects from Kherson in the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin

In 1993, the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin returned a Bronze Age collection of more than 200 objects from the previous possession of the German philologist Ernst Grumach to the Kherson Museum of Local History, Ukraine. Regarding the current whereabouts of the objects, this article shows their traces in the archives of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte and provides an insight into the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s cooperation with the states of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. The provenance of the Grumach Collection is traced from its wartime relocation during the Second World War to its return under Senior Curator Klaus Goldmann. The essay aims to highlight the potential of museum archives for research on restituted collection items.