Beetles belong to the holometabolous insects and are currently the most diverse group of insects, with around 400000 described species. The beetle collection of the Center of Natural History (CeNak) was almost completely destroyed at the end of the Second World War and then rebuilt and today comprises about 1 million specimens and more than 6000 type specimens. The collection mainly comprises adult needled individuals, and some dry-prepared larvae and imagos preserved in alcohol. Most of the surviving and pre-World War II beetles are preserved in our alcohol collection. The most important partial collections are those of Fritz Borchmann (1943), Pierre Charles Lepesme (1943), Emil Friedrich Karl Ross (1944), Felix Münchmeyer (1944 and 1956), Eduard Voss (1944-1974), Walter Wüsthoff (1947), Georg Frey (1948 and 1955), Eugene LeMoult (1957), Victor Laboissiere (1957), and Kurt Sokolowski (1949-1961). In addition, larger holdings have been added in recent years through the collections of Rolf Prigge (1995), Hans Dieter Clausen (2017), Konrad Hengmith (2020), Wilfred Broda (2020), and Manfred Zeising (2021). The beetle collection is broadly based worldwide and includes, in addition to a Hamburg home collection, large amounts of determinate and indeterminate material from the Neotropics, Nearctic, Palaearctic, and Oriental. The types of the collection are currently documented in several catalogs (Simões et al. 2021, Seidel et al. in prep.) and are presented here.

The butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) belong to the holometabolous insects and are one of the most diverse insect groups with more than 180,000 described species. The butterfly collection was almost completely destroyed at the end of the Second World War and then rebuilt and today comprises about 1 million specimens and more than 2000 type specimens. The collection contains mostly pinned adult specimens, but also includes a number of pinned dry larvae and a larval alcohol collection. Most specimens are from the Palaearctic region with excellent species representation from Germany.The largest and most important collections which have been obtained being those of Georg Warnecke (1943 and 1963), Richard Jänig (1949), Fritz Diehl (1950–1972), Hermann Rödinger (1952), the Jungius Gesellschaft (1956), Hanan Bytinski-Salz (1960), Eduard Feldtmann (1960), Günter Albers (1972), the Altona Museum (1965, 1973, 1976), and Mathilde Linz (1974). More recently the largest newly obtained collections were those of Hans-Jürgen Kelm (2003), Walter Baltruweit (2013), Jörg Roloff (2014), Thomas Tischler (2017), Bernd Heinze (2020), and Karl-Heinz Müller-Köllges (2020). Most specimens are from the Palaearctic region with excellent species representation from Germany. The Nearctic, Afrotropics and Southeast Asia regions are also well represented. The types of the collection are currently documented in several catalogs (Zahiri et al. in prep.) and are presented here.