The Dresden piano manufacturer William Ernst Kaps owned an extensive private library, whose books were furnished with ex libris of the artists Hans Unger, Fritz Kleinhempel and Georg Erler, among others. After Kaps' death due to illness in August 1943, his Jewish wife Berta was deported to Auschwitz in October 1943 and murdered there on November 1, 1943. The Gestapo confiscated the couple's library.
Between 1955 and 1958 the Dresden City Museum purchased a total of 51 publications from a book and art antiquarian bookshop in Dresden-Klotzsche. Among them was a copy from the former library of the couple Berta and William Ernst Kaps, which was acquired in 1955. According to address book entries, the bookseller worked as a bank clerk between 1920 and 1940, in 1941 as a foreign exchange dealer and from 1942 as a "Reichsangestellter" without further details.
