The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Prior to this visit, I sent Kellner a wish list, because, in fact, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is the owner of a unique collection—some of the first books that the Nazis ever stole. Given that the library existed in the very town where National Socialism was born, a town that from 1936 was led by Rudolf Buttmann, the Nazi who carried the fourth membership card issued by the party, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek had particularly good opportunities for taking part in the plundering. Some of the first collections that came here in the 1930s belonged to the foremost Jewish families in Munich. Also here were books from religious groups, Freemasons’ orders, and other groups under Nazi assault.

  “Few complete libraries ended up here. The librarians mainly picked out the rarest books, first editions from the 1700s or copies of works that the library did not have,” Kellner tells me.

  Books from the private collection of Thomas Mann, among others, ended up in the library. These were stolen from his house, which lay within walking distance along the river Isar, on the other side of the English Garden. While Thomas Mann was off on a lecture tour abroad in the spring of 1933, he received news of a wave of arrests of intellectuals in Germany. His family advised him not to come back, and Mann settled temporarily on the French Riviera. Six months later, Mann’s house on Poschinger Strasse was confiscated.1

  After the end of the war, the US Army handed over a motley collection of some thirty thousand books to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Some of them have been arranged with their flyleaves open, on the table in front of me, and this is the first time I have seen certain stamps that are difficult to misunderstand. On the flyleaf of a book entitled Polnische Juden (Polish Jews) I find black-stamped text: “Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschland” (National Institute for the History of New Germany, headed by the historian Walter Frank). This text runs around the Nazi state crest, an open-winged eagle with its talons gripping a wreath decorated with swastikas. In the book Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German People) there is another stamp of the German eagle, this one larger and oval and ringed by the words “Ordensburg Sonthofen Bibliothek,” which was one of the elite schools of the Nazi Party. It is a photographic book, with black-and-white head shots of weather-beaten, grim-faced Germans, many of them in profile with their noses clearly outlined. The last stamp I see in one of the books on display is much simpler—a blue rectangle with the text “Politische Bücherei. Bayerische Politische Polizei” (Political Library. Bayern Political Police).

  A book bearing the stamp of the Bayerische Politische Polizei, led by Heinrich Himmler from 1933. The secret police in Bayern was used as a model for the terror machine that Himmler built up during the 1930s.

  The books on the table are individual fragments, early shards of the ambition that would eventually lead to the most extensive theft of books in the world. Maybe one can see these books as archaeological remains of this plan, which extended from research institutes and elite schools to the ideological warfare of secret police organs. One might describe them as “early shards” because these stamps represent some of the earliest attempts by the regime to establish an ideological program of knowledge acquisition, which proposed to not only study its enemies but also build a new, ideologically based culture of research and education in the Third Reich.

  As time passed, these fragmentary efforts grew and were replaced by ever larger and more ambitious projects, as the Third Reich began to enjoy rapid success. The common feature of this vision was a frenzied obsession with the collection and ownership of knowledge. The books on the table are remnants, components of a series of new libraries that the Nazi regime had begun to build up in the early 1930s.

  How this collection of books from entirely separate organizations was brought together and how it ended up in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is somewhat of a mystery to this day, according to Stephan Kellner. The books were most likely confiscated by the Western Allies from an extensive number of institutions, public authorities, and organizations in the Third Reich. Many of the books were taken to the United States, while others were handed over to German libraries in order to rebuild collections that had been destroyed during the war.

  “We see so many stamps in this collection from different organizations within the Third Reich. There were constant conflicts and rivalries over these books. Building up a library of one’s own became a sort of status indicator in the Nazi movement. Book collecting was a mania. The foundation of this lay in the idea of totalitarian ideology, the desire to control every aspect of citizens’ lives. The same totalitarian thinking also applied to the sciences, where there was an attempt to redefine every area. Everything had to be National Socialist. Everything, everywhere. They didn’t only strive to replace old structures and systems with their own, they wanted to create entirely new ones too. It wasn’t enough to ‘Nazify’ a traditional university. They had to found a new school, in a new building, with a new name, and teach a new ideology,” Stephan Kellner tells me, before going on to the significance of Mein Kampf in German society. “This urge to replace everything, to do everything from scratch, had some quasi-religious aspects. Couples that had wedded earlier would receive a Bible as a gift, but now they got a copy of Mein Kampf. That’s an example of how far they were prepared to go.”

  The rubber-stamped books are a clear expression of this totalitarian urge. The stamp of the Bayerische Politische Polizei (BPP) on an anthropological study of child care among indigenous people caught my eye, suggesting that the security police had wider ambitions than merely studying Communists and politically subversive groups. In fact, this political police entity would constitute an early building block for that organ within the Third Reich that would take the totalitarian philosophy furthest of all: the Schutzstaffel, abbreviated as the SS.

  The Bayerische Politische Polizei was originally a part of the Weimar Republic’s decentralized police system, in which the states had their own independent departments of secret police. This police system would change radically in the Third Reich. When the Nazis assumed power in 1933, the BPP in Munich found itself with a new chief: a thirty-three-year-old agronomist by the name of Heinrich Himmler.

  Himmler had grown up in a conservative and strict Catholic family in Munich. He was regarded by his school friends as an introspective, socially uncomfortable person suffering from poor health, including stomach problems that continued to plague him throughout his life. In spite of this he tried to pursue a career in the military. To his great disappointment, he never had time to get to the front before the Armistice, and he opted instead for a course in agronomy at the Technical University in Munich.

  Himmler admired the free corps, which had crushed the Communists in Munich. He began taking an interest in the far-right outlook, defined by anti-Semitism, militarism, and nationalism, while also developing a deep interest in religion, occultism, and German mythology. He joined the NSDAP in 1923, on the recommendation of Ernst Röhm, with whom he had become acquainted in the city’s far-right circles. Röhm was a decorated war hero and the cofounder and leader of the party’s paramilitary offshoot, known as the SA.

  Himmler was thrown right into the ferment after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. He managed to avoid prison, and he rose quickly through the ranks in the vacuum that arose while the party was banned and its leaders had either fled or been imprisoned. When the NSDAP was reformed in 1925, Himmler became a member of the SS, a small elite bodyguard within the SA whose main purpose was to protect Adolf Hitler from threats—including those from within the movement. Initially, this small organization consisted only of a dozen or so men. Himmler was no foot soldier, but he proved to have a noteworthy talent for bureaucracy, organization, and planning. He already seemed to have had a clear vision for the SS. In 1927, he told Adolf Hitler his plans for developing the SS into a racially pure elite force, a loyal military group, and an ideological spearhead organization personally answerable to Hitler.2 Hitler saw Himmler’s plans a
s a way of balancing the power of the SA, which had grown in an almost uncontrollable manner during the Weimar Republic.

  With Hitler’s support, Himmler rose quickly within the SS, and in 1929, he was made Reichsführer-SS, the head of the entire organization. At that stage the SS scarcely had 300 members. By the end of 1933, it had more than 200,000 members.3

  Unlike the SA, which principally recruited members of the working class, Himmler opted for well-educated middle-class men. He viewed the SS as a racial and intellectual elite. In order to be admitted as a member, one had to be able to demonstrate an unimpeachable Aryan family tree going back to 1750. An educational background in law, for instance, often took precedence. Attributes such as ruthlessness, fanaticism, loyalty, and brutality were also important.

  The SS was permeated by Himmler’s personal interest in history, mythology, and racial dogma. The formation of the SS was inspired by historical elite groups such as the samurai, the Teutonic order of knights, and the Jesuits. The SS would be an Aryan warrior class in which the SS man embodied a new human being, a “superhuman.” In 1931 Himmler started building the intelligence wing within the SS: Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS—usually abbreviated as SD.

  After the transfer of power in 1933, the process of fusing the old intelligence machine of the Weimar Republic with the party’s own network began. In time the SS was given virtually unlimited power to expand and infiltrate the fabric of German society. Himmler soon controlled all of the police forces in Germany.4

  The sizable expansion of the SS in the first few years of the 1930s put it on an inevitable collision course with its parent organization, the SA, which by 1933 had grown into Germany’s largest military force, with over 3 million members. Adolf Hitler, suspecting that Ernst Röhm was planning a coup to overthrow him, secretly gave Himmler the job of preempting the SA. In the last few days of June 1934 the SS struck against the leadership of the SA, displaying the efficiency and brutality that would become the hallmark of the organization. Some two hundred people in the top echelons of the SA’s leadership were arrested or murdered in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives.

  The secret police at state level changed its name to Gestapo, which was also the name of a secret police department in Berlin set up by Hermann Göring. By this time, the SD had already moved its head office from Munich to the capital. In connection with this move an inventory of confiscated literature was taken, which indicated that the collection had already grown to more than 200,000 books.5

  • • •

  In 1936 a new kind of library began to take form in the new Berlin head office of the SD. Ever since the Nazis took power, the secret police in the federal states and the SD had been watching various sectors of the book market. Everything from literary criticism, libraries, book publishing, and the importation of books to the arrest and harassment of authors, book dealers, editors, and publishers was under scrutiny. Hundreds of thousands of books had been seized from enemies of the regime. On the other hand, there was no coherent plan about what to do with all this literature. Some of the books were donated to libraries, others were collected by the various organizations in a more or less structured manner. However, in 1936 the SD officially set up a research library for politically undesirable literature in Berlin and a number of librarians were employed to start cataloging the collection.6 At the same time an order went out from Himmler to all departments of the secret police in Germany. They were ordered to go through their inventories of confiscated literature and immediately send such materials to a new Zentralbibliothek für das gesamte politisch unerwünschte Schrifttum, a library of literature about “political undesirables.” The library was soon expanded in terms of its content to all kinds of literature with some connection to the “enemies of the Reich”—for instance, authors who in one way or another had been opponents of the Nazi ideology. According to one witness, by May 1936 the library had already grown to between 500,000 and 600,000 volumes.7

  After 1936, the inflow of literature increased enormously as a consequence of the general intensification of persecution against the Reich’s “internal enemies.” In mid-1937, the SD stepped up its attacks on churches and congregations. The regime lashed out at what it regarded as “political activity” within the church. Some felt that the church was working against Nazi ideology and should therefore be banned, but Adolf Hitler was not prepared to go that far. The persecution hit hardest against Catholics, evangelical groups, and clergymen who opposed the regime. And after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the SS led a nationwide sweep of political and ideological enemies. Einsatzkommando Österreich, a special commando group from the SD, confiscated libraries and archives from organizations, government departments, parties, institutions, and private individuals. In May the organization sent a trainload to Berlin of some 130 tons of impounded books and archive materials.

  At the end of 1938, there was a wave of new additions to the collection from another dramatic event—Kristallnacht. In a pogrom across the country in November 1938, more than a thousand synagogues were torched, and over twenty thousand Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps.8 This also gave rise to a new wave of book burnings across Nazi Germany, this time of Jewish religious literature. In hundreds of towns, synagogue libraries were plundered by Nazis and local residents, who dragged out Torah scrolls, the Talmud, and prayer books into the streets, tore them apart, stomped on them, and burned them. Just as in 1933, the destruction of literature had a ritual, festive atmosphere that frequently attracted thousands of onlookers and participants. In the little town of Baden, Nazis marched up and down the streets with Torah scrolls before they finally flung them into the fire. In Vienna’s Jewish quarter, writings and religious artifacts from a number of synagogues were collected into a large pile and then burned. In Hessen, Torah scrolls were rolled out in the streets, while children from the Hitlerjugend cycled over the holy texts. And in the little town of Herford in western Germany, children used them to make confetti for a folk festival. In other places, the Jewish texts were allegedly used as toilet paper, or for games, where children played soccer with them. In Frankfurt, Jews were forced to tear up and burn Torah scrolls and other religious writings.9

  But despite the extensive destruction, many of the collections were saved by an unexpected hand. Just as in 1933, when the most important parts of the library and archive of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were saved from the flames by the SA, some of the most important Jewish collections escaped the general plunder of Kristallnacht. By a secret order, a number of especially valuable archives and libraries were removed.10 More than 300,000 books from seventy different Jewish congregations, including the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna and the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, were confiscated and taken to Berlin.

  In 1939, there was an extensive reorganization of the proliferating security apparatus of the regime, which led to the establishment of the Reich Main Security Office: Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), a superorganization in which police and intelligence entities such as the Gestapo, the SD, and Kriminalpolizei were arrayed to fight the enemies of the state. The library that the SD had begun to build in Berlin now ended up in the new department Amt II (second office) of the RSHA, tasked with investigating political enemies. Franz Six, an SS-Brigadeführer, was chosen to head the section. As the chief of Amt II, Six presented the purpose of the section’s library as follows: “In order to understand the spiritual weapons of our ideological enemies, it is necessary to go deeply into the writings that they have produced.”11 However, this research library would soon move to an entirely different section of the RSHA, which Franz Six was put in charge of. Office seven, Section VII, was a more specifically dedicated research division devoted to “ideological research and evaluation.”12

  Only when the war broke out did the RSHA get its big opportunity to plunder books. By the end of 1939 the first spoils arrived, six railroad cars of Jewish literature
from Poland. These books had been taken from just one library belonging to the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. Thousands of libraries would eventually be plundered in Poland alone.13 Section VII’s activity became so extensive that it had to be housed in two confiscated Freemasons’ lodges on Eisenacher Strasse and Emser Strasse in Berlin. The library of Section VII ended up consisting of a series of departments focusing on a variety of enemies. The most extensive of these was the department of Jewish literature. There was also another department of syndicalist, anarchist, Communist, and Bolshevik literature, as well as a department of pacifist and Christian literature, and those of various sects and minorities.

  By and large, the library of Section VII would reflect the subjects in which Himmler himself took an interest, covering much more ground than merely “enemies of the state”—it was a reflection of the worldview of Himmler and the SS. The most curious inclusions in the RSHA’s library were the sections devoted to occultism. The relationship of the SS to occultism has commonly been exploited in popular culture, in often sensationalist documentaries and books. Yet the occult inclusions in the RSHA library testify to the great seriousness of the subject in the SS. An “occult library” had already been in the making within the SD before the RSHA came into being. This was used as the foundation for a library devoted to the subject: the Zentralbibliothek der okkulten Weltliteratur.14 It included, among other things, a section called Sonderauftrag H, focusing on the magical arts and incantations. There was a collection of books on occult science, Geheimwissenschaftlichen, and other works on theosophy, sects, and astrology. Much of this literature can be traced back to plundered German Freemasons’ orders. Another section, Sonderauftrag C, was on pseudo-religious subjects and also contained a large collection of pornography and literature on sexology. Yet the SS did not limit itself to stealing books on behalf of Section VII—paradoxically enough, it also stole human beings. Several Jewish scholars and intellectuals were kidnapped and taken to the RSHA’s book depots in Berlin, where they were made to work in libraries, sometimes on elucidating texts written in Hebrew and Yiddish for the SS.