Julius Riemer (4 April 1880, Berlin – 17 November 1958, Lutherstadt Wittenberg) was a German factory owner, natural history and ethnological collector and museum founder.
Collecting became a substitute for him here: a visit to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, opened in 1889, together with his grandfather became a key experience for the nine-year-old Julius Riemer.
By the end of the 1940s, he owned one of the largest and most valuable private collections of natural history and ethnology in Germany.
Among the natural objects were minerals, fossils, feathers, skulls as well as bones, pressed plants, molluscs and insects.
For example, the museum owns the skeleton of an extinct giant auk and a very systematic collection of ethnographic pieces from Oceania, as well as larger holdings from Africa and individual exhibits from America.
As a result of the air war, Riemer decided to move part of his collection to his house in Sieversdorf and also rented barns and other land from farmers.
Benno Wolf's bequest, in which he bequeathed his scientific material to Julius Riemer, dates from 5 September 1936 (KNOLLE 1990).
As Nazi pressure intensified, Riemer felt compelled, on 15 August 1939, to replace Ahnenerbe-Reichsgeschäftsführer, who was later sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Medical Trial Wolfram Sievers of his cooperation to reduce mistrust.
For on 6 July 1942 Benno Wolf – 71 years old – had been arrested by the Gestapo and taken with the 17th old-age transport from Berlin to the Ghetto Theresienstadt deported.
On 25 April 1947, Riemer bequeathed Benno Wolf's estate materials located in Pottenstein to the Nuremberg Natural History Society, Department for Karst Research, by power of attorney.
[1] After 1945, Julius Riemer received an offer from the provincial pastor and biologist Otto Kleinschmidt to set up a natural history and ethnology museum in Wittenberg Castle as an extension to the church research home there.
In 1949, the first exhibition rooms were opened,[2] In 1954 the foundation of the Museum für Natur- und Völkerkunde from his private collection, which he directed until his death in 1958.
The lower floor housed the natural history exhibition with the subject areas of evolution, zoological systematics and physiology and one room each with primates and ungulates; the upper floor contained exhibitions on the cultures of Africa and Oceania, plus smaller areas on Ancient Egypt and Pre-Columbian America.
Since the Wittenberg Castle was completely renovated and architecturally redesigned from 2011 onwards in view of the Luther Year 2017, the exhibition there with objects from the Julius Riemer Collection had to move out and was stored.
A larger collection of ethnological objects, which had been kept and exhibited on loan in Wittenberg, returned to its original location, the Museum Mauretianum in Altenburg (Thuringia).
In order to achieve this goal, it promoted the preservation of the collection and its museum and academic reception with numerous events.
In addition, there is a smaller exhibition area that deals biographically with Julius Riemer as a collector and patron.
Scientific content is conveyed via 15 leading objects each from natural history and ethnology to make the large number of exhibits on display didactically accessible.
For the first time since 2012, natural history and ethnological objects from the Julius Riemer Collection were exhibited in a thematic context.