ABSTRACT
In April 1962 Adolf Rüter, director of the Iish in Amsterdam since 1950, received an unexpected visit. Herbert Allerdt, the house lawyer of the German Social-Democratic Party, had come to see him. He demanded nothing less than a handover of the spd party archive, against refund of the purchase price paid in the special emergency situation after the Nazi seizure of power. When the archive was sold in 1938, the desperate situation of the émigré spd had allegedly been improperly exploited. 1
