Between 1950 and 1974, Erich Ziegelmeier regularly collected macrozoobenthos samples around the Island of Heligoland. Only few of these samples were evaluated (Ziegelmeier 1978) while most of them got forgotten in a basement storage, without any care. When the respective building was given up, we retrieved the samples. Many of the glass vessels were broken by frost or dessicated due to rotten seals, others proved no more viable because of insufficient fixation or buffering. But for two sampling stations northwest of Heligoland, a reasonable number of samples was still in good order. These samples were analysed between 2012 and 2015. However, we don't know whether all of the original individuals were conserved over that long period of storage; thus, abundances should be regarded as minimum figures. The main value of these data may be the documentation of the species spectrum in the 1960ies and their relative abundances.