The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  It was a pragmatic plan, in which Rosenberg for once seemed to be aware of realpolitik. Probably his plan was based on practical experience—he was well aware of the extraordinarily complex patchwork of people and cultures within the span of the Soviet Empire. Unlike other leading Nazis, he had actually seen the endless Russian and Ukrainian steppes. It was a plan that, had it been implemented, might have changed the course of the war.

  But it never gained any traction among the Nazi leadership. As far as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were concerned, it was quite unthinkable that slaves could be given self-rule—even less, that these “subhumans” could be made into real comrades in arms. In one of his conversations around the table, which was noted down on Martin Bormann’s orders, Hitler expressed the view that the Slavic people were “born to be slaves.”23 Not only Hitler and Himmler opposed Rosenberg’s eastern politics, but also Hermann Göring and Martin Bormann. Faced with such formidable opposition, Rosenberg did not stand a chance.

  Leaders of the Reichskommissariats were directly appointed by and subordinated to Adolf Hitler, and this led to a dilution of Rosenberg’s authority.

  The brutish Nazi, Erich Koch, was chosen to lead the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. “If I meet a Ukrainian worthy of sitting at my table I have to have him shot,” he said, summarizing his view of his new subjects. According to Koch, “The lowest possible German worker is racially and biologically more valuable than the population here.”24

  Koch’s summary policies had a detrimental effect on the initially positive response to the Germans, as Rosenberg had predicted. A ferocious resistance was put up against the occupying power and its extermination policies once the population realized that repressive Bolsheviks were, in every sense, preferable to the Nazis.

  Another reality that undercut Rosenberg’s position of power was that he lacked military resources in the two Reichskommissariats that had been set up. The power vacuum that arose was filled by Himmler and the SS. Since the outbreak of war, the influence of the SS had been consolidated in almost every part of the regime. Hitler, with a certain amount of justification, had an almost paranoid mistrust of his generals in the Wehrmacht, and he successively transferred power to his loyal Praetorian Guard.

  What had strengthened Himmler’s position of power more than anything was the organization’s military wing, Waffen-SS, which had consistently kept growing from 1939 into an army that by the end of the war comprised almost a million soldiers. In the merciless war being waged on the eastern front, the SS would take over many of the Wehrmacht’s tasks. One of these was the fight against “partisans,” an activity that in practice was used as a way of implementing extermination policies.

  In spite of Alfred Rosenberg’s failed attempts to influence policy toward the East, he found solace in the ERR’s successful work in the Soviet zone. Adolf Hitler had given the ERR a thoroughgoing mandate to finecomb “libraries, archives, Masonic lodges, and other ideological and cultural institutions of all kinds, to identify useful material and confiscate it for the use of the NSDAP’s ideological sphere and the research work of the Hohe Schule.”

  In principle, the ERR was mandated to use any means and methods considered necessary for the plundering. The Führer also ordered the Wehrmacht to assist the ERR in its work. What made things fundamentally different from routines on the western front was that the ERR now became Wehrmachtsgefolge—that is, it accompanied the army. In the West, the Wehrmacht had often distanced itself or even actively worked against the plundering, which many of the generals felt gave a bad name to the army.

  But in the Soviet Union the moral stance of the Wehrmacht was considerably less elevated.

  In the West, the plundering had been limited to clearly defined groups: Jews, Freemasons, and political enemies—while property belonging to “normal” Frenchmen, the Dutch, and Danes had largely been respected. In the East, the rules of play were quite different. Resisting all pragmatism, Rosenberg involved himself in the plundering with systematic ruthlessness—which at root related to his personal hatred of Bolshevism, as he testified at the Nuremberg trials after the war: “Because those whom we considered as our adversaries or opponents from the point of view of our conception of the world are different in the West from what they are in the East. In the West there were certain Jewish organizations and Masonic lodges, and in the East there was nothing more than the Communist Party.”25

  As Rosenberg saw it, the property of the Communist Party had to be regarded as “Jewish,” because the Bolshevik regime was a part of the Jewish world conspiracy.

  Despite its strong position, the ERR did not lack for competitors in the Soviet Union. As the advance continued, a special task force known as Sonderkommando Künsberg, following the three army groups closely, had made raids on museums, libraries, and archives, with impounded materials sent back to Berlin. Formally, its units were under the command of Joachim von Ribbentrop’s foreign affairs department, but they were led by an SS-Obersturmbannführer, the historian Baron Eberhard von Künsberg.

  The three units formed a sort of advance party, with more thorough plundering routines following on behind. Sonderkommando Künsberg made raids on significant targets, and just as with the earlier mentioned Sonderkommando Paulsen in Poland, artifacts viewed as “Germanic” were at the top of the list. Among these were Andreas Schlüter’s famous Amber Room in the Catherine Palace outside Leningrad. But tens of thousands of books were also taken from the tsar’s palace and shipped to Germany in boxes labeled “Zarenbibliothek Quatchina.” Some of Künsberg’s seizures would later be handed to the ERR, including books from the tsar’s palace and a large share of confiscated Jewish literature.26

  The ERR had a more academic approach, based on inspections of institutions, libraries, archives, and museums. The sort of plundering it carried out was methodical, scrutinizing, and selective. Experts were dispatched to the Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941 to make an initial inspection and compile lists of valuable collections. One of these experts, the Baltic German archivist Gottlieb Ney, would spend a whole year assessing libraries in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Ney, who worked for Hohe Schule der NSDAP’s library, moved to Sweden after the war and worked as an archivist in Lund.

  The ERR set up three separate groups: Hauptarbeitsgruppe Ostland (Baltic region), Hauptarbeitsgruppe Mitte (White Russia and west Russia), and Hauptarbeitsgruppe Ukraine. Offices were established in Riga, Minsk, and Kiev to administer the plundering work across the territories, which included the Jewish settlement areas where most eastern Jews were still living.

  To a certain extent Rosenberg was right when he claimed that in the east there was “only” the Communist Party. The Soviet regime had really cleared the way for the Nazi plunderers, because most of the collections had already been confiscated and nationalized, and Freemasons and similar organizations were banned. Much of the loot had either been sold off to the West or integrated into the public collections. The Nazis therefore focused on plundering the public institutions, which had the richest collections.27

  The process of nationalization had also been initiated in the Baltic region and eastern Poland during the short period of Soviet rule, of which the YIVO Institute was just one example. But the nationalizations had mainly been focused on public collections, institutions, and religious groups, whereas state appropriation of private property had not yet come so far.28

  The ERR’s plundering operation in the Soviet Union was as ambitious as it was extensive. According to one of the organization’s own reports, 2,265 institutions were searched. The work required far-reaching cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the SD, but also with archivists, librarians, and experts from other German institutions.

  Within Hauptarbeitsgruppe Ukraine, for instance, there were 150 experts organizing the plunder of hundreds of libraries, public collections, universities, churches, palaces, and synagogues.29 Religious institutions in the Soviet Uni
on, which had already been assaulted by the Bolsheviks, were hit extra hard. Thousands of priests had been murdered or sent to labor camps in Siberia by the Soviet regime. In all, Nazi organizations are estimated to have plundered 1,670 Russian Orthodox churches, 532 synagogues, and 237 Catholic churches.

  Particular interest, apart from Jewish collections, was focused on archives and libraries belonging to the Communist Party. The RSHA laid claim to anything of significance for intelligence, while much other material went to Alfred Rosenberg’s library project in the East, the Ostbücherei, into which the émigré libraries from Paris were also incorporated. In addition, other German research institutes on eastern studies, such as the Wannsee Institute and the Institute for Eastern Europe in Breslau, claimed a share of the loot from the Soviet Union.

  Several hundred libraries were looted in Minsk, of which the Lenin Library alone filled seventeen railroad cars.30 In Kiev, the so-called revolutionary archive—an enormous collection of documents pertaining to the years of the Russian Revolution—was taken. This archive also included documentation from the Ukrainian National Republic led by Symon Petljura. The ERR further managed to acquire the Communist Party’s complete archive for Smolensk Oblast—all fifteen hundred shelf-yards of it.31

  This material was earmarked for the production of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, but it was also taken because “Germans have to know more about Bolshevism in order to be able to fight it,” as a bulletin from the ERR explained. The Ostbücherei, on Gertraudenstrasse in Berlin, would become the principal hub of this research. Already in the first year after the invasion in 1941, the library absorbed half a million books. Two hundred thousand books were shipped in from the ERR’s office in Riga, while up to three hundred thousand were plundered in Smolensk.32 The library also collected large amounts of archive material, photographs, newspapers, journals, and maps.

  Just as in Poland, destruction of materials in the Soviet Union exceeded the plunder by a very wide margin. One researcher has estimated that the Nazis may have destroyed upward of 100 million books in the war, of which the overwhelming share was in the Soviet Union.33

  The war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 was the single most brutal conflict in world history, with a human cost somewhere in the region of 30 million lives. It was a war that in a material and cultural sense caused unparalleled devastation. Some of this was attributable to the Red Army itself, when it used the traditional Russian scorched-earth tactic, leaving as little as possible of value for the enemy. The scorched earth would be scorched yet again when the Germans applied the same tactic during their own retreat.

  But the Nazis waged war on Slavic culture for the purpose of its diminishment and extermination. Tens of millions of books that lacked relevance to Nazi research were destroyed. Because of the sheer scale of the booty, the selection process was also very stringent.

  Important cultural and historical symbols, such as royal palaces, were systematically destroyed. Hitler’s goal was to utterly level the large cities of the Soviet Union. The cultural city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), which he regarded as the “foot-in-the-door of Europe” for Asiatic people, was going to be demolished and the population starved to death. The Baltic region would eventually be annexed by the Third Reich. Moscow, the center of Bolshevism, would be wiped off the surface of the earth by the creation of an artificial lake where the city stood—the Nazis planned to open the dam gates of the Volga Canal and flood the whole area.34 Even Kiev would be leveled to the ground. According to Hitler’s plan, Crimea and large areas of southern Ukraine would be emptied of their inhabitants, creating space for a Germanic colony.

  Even areas like the Baku district, Galicia (western Ukraine), and the Volga colony, which had been an autonomous Soviet republic in the Soviet Union populated by a German minority that had settled in Russia in the 1700s, would be annexed by the Third Reich. This was how lebensraum would be carved out in the east for German people. As in Poland, the plan was for Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other peoples to be degraded into slavery under their new German overlords. However, in areas intended for immediate incorporation into the Third Reich, the existing population would be displaced or exterminated to make way for German settlers. In these places, everything that might remind one of the previous culture had to be utterly expunged.

  Meanwhile, Nazi researchers were continuously seeking—often fruitlessly—traces of a historical Germanic presence in these regions that might legitimize the annexations. No other area was as devastated by destruction and plunder as Ukraine. According to one estimate, some 50 million books were destroyed there during the war.35

  • • •

  On the stone wall above one of the windows in the street, the color has faded in the sunlight. Beneath, one can make out a few faint, but graceful, Hebrew letters. Vilnius’s Jewish quarter hides itself under a thin layer of yellow paint—a few picturesque blocks of low-built stone houses and winding medieval streets. Many of the houses seem largely untouched since the war. Some of the houses have sunk into themselves, their roofs buckling, and they seem close to collapse. Today, vegetarian restaurants coexist with strip clubs and small book publishers along the blocks that were once the center of Jewish Vilnius.

  I walk along the street that used to be known as Straszuna, but was renamed Žemaitijos gatvę after the war. The street originally derived its name from the rabbi, researcher, and businessman Mattityahu Strashun, one of Vilnius’s prominent intellectual personalities of the 1800s. Among other things, Strashun contributed to the expansion of the city’s Jewish education system. But his fame was built on the great library he founded. Strashun, who spoke German, French, Latin, and Russian, collected everything from medieval manuscripts in Hebrew to literary works, poetry, travel books, and scientific literature. On his death in 1885, he donated his library to the Jewish congregation in Vilnius, which, a few years later, opened the library to the public. After being further added to by donations, the library was soon regarded as one of the foremost Jewish libraries in Eastern Europe. The historical collection attracted researchers, historians, and rabbis from all over the world.

  The library was a strong contributory factor in the establishment of Vilnius as the beating heart of Yiddish culture, suggested the writer Hirsz Abramowicz.36 Abramowicz paid several visits himself to the library, and was particularly appreciative of Khaykl Lunski, Strashun’s eccentric and somewhat legendary librarian. Lunski was a man who lived and breathed the library, and who kept himself to a side building of the large synagogue in the Jewish quarter. Lunski had a record of the whole collection in his head: “He knew every religious text, every secular text, and every journal.” Every researcher and author who had a subject in mind had to meet the “inimitable” Khaykl Lunski.37

  According to Abramowicz, Lunski always wore the same clothes and could live a whole day on “a bit of rye bread and a herring head.” Approaching sixty, he was still working at the library when the Wehrmacht took Vilnius on June 24, 1941. Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s attack against the Soviet Union—had started two days earlier. The city was taken without any significant battles, as the Red Army chose to withdraw before the advancing German forces.

  In July 1941 Alfred Rosenberg sent a researcher named Hermann Gotthardt to Vilnius. At first, Gotthardt adopted Vilnius almost as if he were a culturally interested tourist or a researcher on a visit to prepare for the writing of a thesis. He visited the city’s museums, synagogues, and libraries to form his ideas about the existing Jewish congregations. He interviewed employees and inquired about the city’s Jewish researchers. By the end of July, he had made an overall assessment and asked the Gestapo to detain three men: the linguist and journalist Noah Prilutski, who had been the head of the Institute for Jewish Culture (YIVO) during the brief Soviet rule, and the Yiddish-language journalist Elijah Jacob Goldschmidt, who was the chief curator for the ethnographic S. Ansky Museum in Vilnius. The third man was Kh
aykl Lunski, librarian at the Strashun Library. Every day in the coming weeks the men were fetched from their cells at the Gestapo headquarters and taken to the Strashun Library, where they were forced to compile lists of the most valuable works in the city’s collections.

  At the same time, there was a massacre going on outside the library’s windows. In July, one of the SS murder units, the Einsatz group, had arrived in Vilnius and arrested five thousand Jewish men. In groups of a hundred at a time they were brought to the little holiday resort town of Ponar, about six miles south of Vilnius. Before the war, the Red Army had dug large pits in which to store fuel tanks adjoining a military airfield. The men were ordered to undress and were then taken ten or twenty at a time to the edge of the pit, where they were shot. The bodies in the pit were covered by a thin layer of sand before the next group was forced to come forward for execution.38 The Nazis also set up murder units composed of Lithuanian volunteers, the Ypatingasis Būrys. Jews were arrested in sudden mobilizations, often carried out on Jewish holy days. Elderly people, the sick, and others considered as “unproductive” were weeded out. Most of the victims were buried in the pits in Ponar, where seven thousand Soviet prisoners of war and some twenty thousand Poles were also murdered.

  Before long women and children were also seized and taken to the pits in Ponar. By the time Goldschmidt, Prilutski, and Lunski had finished their work for Hermann Gotthardt in August, thousands of Vilnius’s Jews had been murdered. Shortly after Gotthardt returned to Berlin with his list, Noah Prilutski and Elijah Jacob Goldschmidt were shot by the Gestapo. For unclear reasons, Khaykl Lunski was released.39

  It was soon clear to Rosenberg’s staff in Berlin that the plunder in the East required a quite different implementation than in the West. The sheer number of libraries, archives, and other collections were simply too large, as also demonstrated by Gotthardt’s conclusions drawn in Vilnius. It was neither possible nor practical to confiscate such enormous amounts of material in a single raid, as had been the practice in Paris or Rome. Another problem was the lack of German researchers who spoke Hebrew and Yiddish, making it difficult to determine which books would be of value in future research. The solution to these problems was often sadistic, but this was also a defining characteristic of the Nazis—they delegated the work to the victims themselves.