Books Manuscripts and Libraries

The looting of Jewish books, manuscripts and libraries was the second arm of the Reich’s cultural confiscation programme, alongside the looting of paintings and decorative art. The book operation was less spectacular and has been less studied than the art operation, but it was larger by volume. By the end of the war the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS Ahnenerbe research foundation, and various Wehrmacht and Reich Ministry offices had confiscated, between them, an estimated three to five million books from Jewish private libraries, Jewish institutions, Masonic lodges and seized libraries of Soviet and Polish institutions. Around half of the confiscated holdings were destroyed by the German authorities themselves, in the so-called purification campaigns of 1942, 1944. The remainder, about one and a half to two and a half million volumes, were found at the end of the war scattered across hundreds of depots in Germany and the western occupied zones. The Allied recovery and the postwar redistribution of these holdings is one of the unfinished stories of the catastrophe.

The institutional libraries of the Polish Jewish community were the largest single category of loss. Warsaw’s Great Synagogue library, the Jewish Theological Seminary library, the Tlomackie Synagogue library and the Library of the Judaic Studies Institute together held around three hundred and fifty thousand volumes in 1939. Almost the entire holdings were destroyed in the campaign of 1939, 1940 or in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. The Vilna libraries, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research with its irreplaceable collection of Eastern European Yiddish materials, the Strashun Library with its early Hebrew printed books, and the Mendele Library, together held around three hundred thousand volumes. The Vilna libraries were partly destroyed and partly confiscated by the ERR for the Hohe Schule project. The Vilna paper brigade, a forced labour detail of Jewish scholars led by the poet Avrom Sutzkever and the librarian Hermann Kruk, was ordered by the Germans to sort the holdings into items to be sent to Frankfurt for the Hohe Schule and items to be sold for paper pulp. The brigade members systematically smuggled the most valuable items out of the sorting centre at the back of the Vilna ghetto, hid them in the ghetto, and after liberation recovered them from the ghetto ruins. Sutzkever’s recovery of the YIVO archive after the war is one of the great cultural rescue stories of the catastrophe.

The private libraries of individual Jewish families across Europe were the largest category of loss by total volume. The Rothschild family library in Vienna, around twenty thousand volumes including manuscripts and incunabula, was confiscated under the Anschluss and dispersed across multiple Reich depots. The Sigmund Freud personal library was sent to London with him in 1938 and survived. The Stefan Zweig library was sent to England and to the United States in stages and survived. Most other private holdings did not. The pattern across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the eastern territories was the same: the family fled or was deported, the apartment was sealed by the German authorities, the books were inventoried by the ERR and the lower-grade items were sold off through the German antiquarian book trade.

The German antiquarian book trade in the 1940s was one of the conduits through which looted Jewish books returned to circulation. The wartime catalogues of the major German auction houses, including those of Hartung in Munich and Hauswedell in Hamburg, are now under research at the Bibliothek der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the German Lost Art Foundation. Provenance research on individual volumes, when an inscribed name or a bookplate is present, can sometimes match the volume to a deportation record and identify the original owner. The work is slow because the bookplates have often been removed and because the volumes have passed through several owners since 1945.

The Allied recovery of looted books was administered by the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt, established in March 1946 in a former IG Farben warehouse. The depot received around three million books, manuscripts and ritual objects between 1946 and 1949. The director, the American captain Seymour Pomrenze, and his successor, the librarian Joseph A. Horne, sorted the holdings by language and by identifying marks. Around two and a half million items were eventually returned to identifiable institutions of origin in the western occupied countries, in the Soviet zone, and in the new state of Israel. The remaining holdings, around five hundred thousand items whose owners could not be identified, were transferred to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc, the organisation Hannah Arendt and Salo Baron had established in 1947 with the support of the Joint Distribution Committee. JCR redistributed the unidentified holdings to surviving Jewish communities in the United States, Britain, Argentina, South Africa and Israel.

The work is not finished. The current research effort is led by the German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Looted Cultural Assets database at the Berlin Central and Regional Library, and the YIVO archive in New York. Around fifty thousand individual volumes have been identified by ownership inscription, bookplate or library stamp in German, Austrian, Czech and Polish public libraries since 2000. Around half of the identified items have been returned to identified Jewish heirs or to successor Jewish institutions. The remainder are still under research. The total scale of the loss continues to be the subject of estimates rather than counts; the books that were destroyed are unrecoverable, and the books that have passed into the international second-hand market without identifying marks are unfindable.

See also

Sources

  • Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud and Eric Ketelaar, eds., Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues, Institute of Art and Law, 2007
  • David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, ForeEdge, 2017
  • Mark Glickman, Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books, Jewish Publication Society, 2016
  • F. J. Hoogewoud, The Offenbach Archival Depot, Bulletin de l’Institut d’Études Juives, 2002
  • Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Looted Books database
  • YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, archives of Avrom Sutzkever and the Vilna paper brigade