The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The Nazis did not disapprove of professors, researchers, writers, and librarians; they wanted to recruit them to form an army of intellectual and ideological warriors who, with their pens, theses, and books, would wage war against the enemies of Germany and National Socialism.

  Inaugurated in Munich in 1936, the Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage (Research Department for the Jewish Question) was an institute aiming to legitimize the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. It was a branch of Nazi historian Walter Frank’s Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschland (National Institute for the History of New Germany).14 The institute aimed to justify Germany’s desire to lay claim to the world, laying low her enemies with “science” and building the intellectual foundations on which the Third Reich would rest for a thousand years. Just as the Roman Empire, the prototype on which National Socialism based itself, was not only armies and architects but also historians and poets, the Thousand-Year Reich would be built not only with blood and stone but also with words.

  In this war, books would not be so much a casualty as a weapon. The Nazis wanted to defeat their enemies not only on the battlefield but also in thought. This victory would endure long after the grave, after the genocides and the Holocaust. Not only to wipe out, but also to justify their actions. It was not by destroying the literary and cultural heritage of their enemies that the Nazis intended to prevail—rather, by stealing, owning, and twisting it, and by turning their libraries and archives, their history, inheritance, and memory against themselves. To capture the right to write their history. It was a concept that set in motion the most extensive book theft in the history of the world.

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  GHOSTS AT BERLINER STADTBIBLIOTHEK

  Berlin

  I am led down a long, deserted corridor, the walls of which are painted a sun-bleached hue of mustard yellow. Here and there are pictures with thin frames, soulless prints commonly seen in hospitals or low-grade civil service offices. The corridor leads into a room that seems to lack any kind of purpose, apart from connecting with more mustard-yellow corridors that lead off in various directions. There is something labyrinthine and unplanned about the building, like a medieval town center. This can be explained. Berlin’s central library, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, situated just a short walk from Bebelplatz, is built on the ruins of Berliner Stadtbibliothek, its predecessor. The imposing building, on the island in the middle of the river Spree, was hit by bombs during the war and to all intents and purposes utterly destroyed. After the war, the library, which lay in the Soviet zone, was rebuilt from within the ruins. Today it is a somewhat schizophrenic building, with its grandiose neoclassical facade and sparse GDR interiors, contrasting with other, modernized areas.

  Sebastian Finsterwalder stops by one of the many gray-painted doors we have passed and fishes out a key. Sebastian, a researcher at the library, is in his thirties, with untidy shoulder-length hair, a studded belt, shoes with neon-yellow soles, and leather gloves with cut-off fingertips. He looks like someone who has just stepped out of one of the nightclubs of Kreutzberg. Sebastian smiles at me as he opens the door and theatrically inhales the smell of an abandoned library: dusty air, dried leather, and faded yellow paper. The room is absolutely pullulating with books, densely packed rows of shelves with worn book spines. As we walk down one of the aisles, I have to turn myself sideways to be able to make my way between the books, which press against my stomach.

  “It’s actually been organized now. When we came here the first time there were books in piles everywhere. All over the floor, in any old order. For decades, people had just thrown them into this room. There were forty thousand books in here. It took months to go through them,” he tells me, showing me a shelf in which every book is marked with a white paper flap and a number.

  “These are some of the books we suspect have been plundered,” says Sebastian, holding out his arm toward the shelf, which stretches some twenty yards to the other end of the room.

  No one today knows exactly how many plundered books there are in the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek in Berlin. Sebastian Finsterwalder shows me room after room, all crammed with books in the same way. There are stolen books in every corner of the enormous building—the largest public library in Germany. Most have not yet been separated from the general collection, which holds in excess of three million volumes. And several tens of thousands have not yet been found.

  Nothing on the surface sets these books apart from any others. They include fairy tales; novels; poetry collections; books about fungi, aircraft, and engineering; songbooks; dictionaries; and religious writings. In order to understand that there is something different about these books one must open them and look inside. Often the first few pages give them away.

  There one may find a red or black stamp in ink. Or a prettily illustrated ex libris, a bookplate glued in at some point by the owner of the book. Often this is an indication of the book’s being a part of a larger collection. Sometimes one also finds a dedication, a signature, or good-luck wishes—as in a German edition of In Darkest Africa by the British explorer Henry M. Stanley, where this dedication has been beautifully written in longhand:

  To my beloved Rudi, on his thirteenth birthday,

  From Mum.

  25.10.1930.

  According to Sebastian, the book probably belonged to Rudi Joelsohn, born in 1917 in Berlin. On August 15, 1942, he was deported to Riga, where three days later he was murdered.1

  If one looks carefully at the flyleaf, one can also make out a cryptic but revealing letter, entered in pencil: J. An abbreviation that gives the book away and reveals the fate of the owner: Judenbücher (Jews’ books).

  Sebastian leads me into his office, where we meet an elderly man who looks like a member of an old German punk band. He defies the stifling July heat with a thick fleece top and a knitted hat. His name is Detlef Bockenkamm, and he is a librarian and a specialist in the library’s historical collections. He was also the first person to start digging in the library’s unpalatable past. Now there is a small but dedicated team of researchers trying to establish some clarity and clear up certain aspects of the library’s complicated background. Together, they have tracked down and manually examined tens of thousands of books in the collection. Along one wall of the office some of the fruits of their labor are kept. On a veneer bookshelf the books lie in piles, and by each pile hangs a paper flap with a name written on it: Richard Kobrak, Arno Nadel, Ferdinand Nussbaum, Adele Reifenberg, and many more. These are the books whose owners Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder have managed to identify.

  One name I do recognize, at the bottom of a pile of five volumes: Annæus Schjødt was a Norwegian lawyer and resistance fighter who fled to Sweden in 1942. After the war it was Schjødt who led the prosecution of Vidkun Quisling and secured his death sentence. Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder have not yet found any documents to explain how and when these books were plundered. But in some rudimentary way they were able to guess. The books must have been stolen from Schjødt’s home after his escape, either by the Gestapo or some other Nazi organization, and then shipped to Germany. They were then almost certainly part of a larger collection found in Schjødt’s home. In Berlin the collection was broken up, and a couple of these books were donated or sold to Berliner Stadtbibliothek. The plunder of Schjødt’s books was not at all out of the ordinary. On these shelves are books from every corner of Europe—wherever the Nazis were active and busy with their plunder.

  On shelves in the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek in Berlin, the plundered books are waiting to be identified. Finding their owners’ descendants today is often a time-consuming and complicated process.

  Compared with the looting of art, these stolen books have attracted a good deal less attention. Only in recent years has the question begun to stir some public interest in Germany. Zentral- und Landesbibliothek in Berlin, thanks to Detlef Bockenkamm, was one of the first libraries to look into the problem. In the
early 2000s he was working on a thesis about the large collection of bookplates that had been found in the library. The owners’ plates had been cut out of the library’s collection, often when the books were deaccessioned. Bockenkamm found hundreds of bookplates with Jewish names and motifs, which made him wonder how these books had actually ended up in the library. He had also started finding some books whose provenance, to say the least, was remarkable.

  In 2002 he recovered some seventy-five books bearing the stamp “Karl-Marx-Haus Trier,” a museum founded by the German Social Democratic Party, which had already been banned in 1933, and whose members were imprisoned, murdered, or forced into exile. Bockenkamm realized that these books had probably been plundered from the party. He started looking for more books with a suspicious provenance. They were everywhere in the collection. Bockenkamm’s first estimate of plundered books in the library was an astounding 100,000, although later this would prove to be a rather modest approximation.

  Bockenkamm also made the unpleasant discovery that his predecessors had not been unaware of the books’ origins. Quite the opposite: They had actually tried to hide and erase this history. In many books the flyleaves had been cut out. Others bore the marks of the owners’ labels having been torn out or scraped off by librarians. Books had also been cataloged with forged origins—or as “unowned” copies.

  “I tried to talk about it with an old librarian still in decent shape and willing to talk. He admitted certain things, but not everything. He took most of the secrets with him into the grave,” says Bockenkamm. He puts a big ledger with a cover of ribbed gray paper on the table. On the cover is a little white label with the inscription “1944–1945 Jagor.”

  The ledger, which Detlef Bockenkamm found in 2005, was the most important and revealing evidence to date of the library’s efforts to cover up the story. It contained about two thousand book titles, cataloged in the collection in the last two years of the war. The name Jagor was a reference to Fedor Jagor, the German ethnologist and explorer, who lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The books had therefore been marked with a J. But this was incorrect, as these books had never belonged to Fedor Jagor. The letter J did not denote Jagor but rather Judenbücher. Registered as number 899 in the ledger is Rudi Joelsohn’s copy of In Darkest Africa.

  The two thousand books proved to be part of a much bigger collection of plundered books acquired by the library during the war. Despite the fact that detailed documentation about the management of the library during the war years has been lost, some of the correspondence concerning the collection has survived. In 1943, the library bought about forty thousand books from Städtische Pfandleihanstalt, Berlin’s pawnbroker, to which enormous numbers of books had been brought after being confiscated from homes in Berlin belonging to deported Jews. The most valuable books had been claimed by Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the SS, and other Nazi organizations. The remains were brought to the pawnbroker to be sold. The library, which contacted Berlin’s municipal office, at first demanded the book collections of “resettled Jews” at no charge. This was denied, as the books belonged to the Third Reich and money raised by their sale would be used to “solve the Jewish question,” a phrase that in 1943 could only mean one thing. Confiscated Jewish property, like a sort of self-financing project, was used to pay for deportations, concentration camps, and mass murder. Ultimately, the library was made to pay 45,000 reichsmarks for the books.

  The last book in the ledger was cataloged on April 20, 1945. On that same day the Red Army instigated a terrible artillery bombardment on Berlin’s city center, at the same time as several other armies started pushing into the city. It was the beginning of the final attack on Berlin as well as a message to Adolf Hitler, who was celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday on this day in the Chancellery.

  Berlin lay in ruins, in other words, as did the Berliner Stadtbibliothek.

  “It’s extraordinary to think that there was still a librarian sitting here in the cellar, cataloging plundered books,” says Sebastian Finsterwalder.

  But in fact the process did not come to an end after Armistice Day. Registration of books purchased in 1943, which have survived the bombardment, continues in the postwar years as if nothing has happened. The only difference is that now the books are no longer labeled as Judenbücher but with a G, as in Geschenk (gifts).

  Bockenkamm found out that the cataloging of books bought from the pawnbroker in 1943 continued into the 1990s. And when Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder a few years ago started looking through the library’s storerooms they found thousands of books from this collection that had not yet been cataloged. But these were not the only stolen books to more or less unobtrusively fill the library shelves.

  The library had lost masses of books on account of the war, with some having been destroyed in the bombings. A large part of the collection had been evacuated to Poland and Czechoslovakia toward the end of the war, where much of it remained and some was plundered by the Red Army. The collection needed to be rebuilt, and certainly there were plenty of abandoned books in a Berlin that had been reduced to rubble. After the war, libraries had their books confiscated if they belonged to party members, public authorities, research institutes, and other organizations in the Third Reich.

  Even books that were regarded as “unowned,” for instance, when found in buildings that had been bombed, were collected. The books were supposed to be commandeered and sorted by Bergungsstelle für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken (Rescue Organization for Scientific Libraries), which was housed in a building on the other side of the street from the Berliner Stadtbibliothek. The organization labeled the books with a number, depending on the place in which they were picked up, before they were redistributed among various libraries in the city.

  On Bergungsstelle’s list there were 209 pickup points, but Finsterwalder, with the researcher Peter Prölls, who is an expert in the area, has managed to establish that books were actually only picked up at about 130 locations.

  “In certain districts there were no books left; they had been ruined, evacuated, or plundered,” says Finsterwalder.

  On one of the walls in his office is an old map of Berlin from 1937. Finsterwalder has marked the various pickup points using flags of various colors: green for places where books were taken, red for places where none were taken, and blue for places where he does not as yet know what happened. Finsterwalder is working with Prölls on a study of Bergungsstelle, an organization whose work remains largely unknown. By means of historical detective work they are trying to find out how the plundered books were distributed. Ultimately, Berliner Stadtbibliothek was to become the most significant recipient of these “rescued” books.

  “One of the reasons we acquired so many of these books was that the director of Bergungsstelle and the head of the library were good friends. They were both Communists and had been imprisoned during the war, so there was a bit of cronyism going on.”

  Where the books actually came from does not seem to have been an issue worthy of consideration at the time, despite many of them having been confiscated from some of the most criminal organizations of the Third Reich. Books labeled “13” came from Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, while books labeled “7” came from Hermann Göring’s air force ministry.2 Books marked “4” came from the private library of the architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, while books marked “5” came from the home of the German writer Walter Bloem. Bloem, one of Germany’s most popular writers in the early 1900s, had been an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler and even published a eulogy to the Führer.

  Also on Bergungsstelle’s list were some of the organizations that were involved in plundering books in occupied Europe. Books labeled “25” were from Alfred Rosenberg’s extensive Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (National Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), which was the ministry for civic governance in the Baltic countries and the Soviet Union.
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  Alfred Rosenberg also used this ministry to build influence for his organization, ERR, which set up a number of local offices in the east to plunder libraries and archives. The organization had several depots in Berlin, but only a fraction of the millions of books it stole were still in Berlin at the end of the war, most having been evacuated to what is now Poland.

  Many of the pickup points listed by Bergungsstelle as possible book depots proved to have already been plundered, in many cases by the trophy brigades of the Red Army, which confiscated books from all over Germany.

  After the war, the director of Bergungsstelle, Günther Elsner, paid a visit to the abandoned Chancellery for the Occupied Eastern Territories, where in the cellars he found two hundred large wooden crates of books. When staff members went back about a week later to pick up the books, the boxes had been forced open and most of the books had been taken.

  One of the most extensive depots of plundered books to end up at Bergungsstelle carried the number 15, which meant that it came from Rosenberg’s foremost competitor in the hunt for Europe’s libraries. Or, to be more precise, the enormous library of plundered books built up at RSHA, SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt, in Berlin. This was the German national board of security, which coordinated the police and intelligence services of the Third Reich, both those of the state and of the Nazi Party. The RSHA, controlled by Heinrich Himmler, was Nazi Germany’s notorious terror organization. At its peak, it had sixty thousand employees conducting surveillance and monitoring the nation’s enemies through a number of subordinate departments such as the Gestapo and the SD (Security Service).

  One of these was Section VII, the Department for Ideological Research and Evaluation, which ran an in-depth mapping activity of the enemies of the state. Section VII built up a library in a building confiscated from one of Berlin’s biggest Freemasons’ lodges on Eisenacher Strasse, and filled this with books stolen from all over Europe. The project grew so ambitious that other buildings also had to be acquired. It is estimated that upward of three million books were sent to Berlin.3 After the war some five hundred thousand of these books were found at Eisenacher Strasse. Most of the library had been evacuated in the last years of the war, and other stock had been destroyed by aerial bombardment. Some of what was found was returned to the countries from which the books had been taken, but an unknown number of volumes were also distributed among Berlin’s libraries.