When, in 1941, the former Preußische Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden was hit by a bomb, precautions were taken to evacuate by and by all holdings of the library to surrounding estates, coal mines, etc. outside of Berlin. What began as a well-controlled procedure with detailed packing lists and evacuation registers soon turned into a hectic removal of the materials due to the pressures of the bomb war, with staff trying to save as much as possible from fire and pillaging. Shortly before the end of the war, a bomb hit the very heart of the building, the central dome-shaped reading hall, and destroyed about 40 percent of it. At this time, fortunately, the majority of the holdings were no longer in the library but packed in crates and distributed among 30 evacuation places to the East and West of Berlin.

In 1943, the East Asia Collection of the former Prussian State Library comprised about 72,000 volumes and was, at the time, one of the most important and largest institutions of its kind in the Western world. As early as towards the end of the 17th century, the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg (1620-1688) had acquired the first Chinese titles for his library which he had opened also to scholars and guests. In 1683, a card catalogue compiled by Andreas Müller listed, after all, 25 mostly Chinese titles.
In the following time, the collection only grew sporadically and with long periods of acquisition intermissions, until, in the 19th century, access to Chinese and subsequently Japanese, titles became easier. By means of the systematical acquisition trips to China of Karl Friedrich Neumann at the beginning of the 19th century and of Herbert Müller in the early 20th century, as well as the purchase of collections by Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller, Friedrich Hirth, Paul Georg von Moellendorff (mainly Mandschu titles) and Eugen Pander (Tibetan titles), the inventory was developed into a pre-eminent working basis for those interested in China and East Asia. The last accession number in the bookform-catalogue of the Libri sinici N.S. (Neue Sammlung, i.e., new collection) dates back to 1939.

Only about 24,000 volumes of the collection made their way back into the library which after the war found itself being situated in what by then had become part of the Soviet occupation zone. A small fraction of materials that went to Marburg were those holdings of the Staatsbibliothek which had been evacuated during the war to places that now were part of the Allies’ occupation zones.
To a large extent, the East Asia Collection is considered destroyed or missing. Nearly one third of the old Collection with ca. 20,000 volumes was stored after the war on Polish territory and was transferred in its entirety to Krakow’s large and important Biblioteka Jagiellonska, where today it comprises a part of the so-called “Berlinka”. At Krakow, the collection is shelved together and professionally taken care of. The materials are accessible in the special manuscript reading room. However, until now, it has not been accessed bibliographically nor is there a catalogue.