The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Inside these walls, during the war, the SS established what may have been the most curious concentration camp of all. Most of the German concentration camps were similar, arranged according to a model developed by SS-Oberführer Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau, the very first concentration camp, which opened in 1933. Here Eicke refined the structure and culture that would function as a model for almost all future camps.

  Theresienstadt was both a concentration camp and a ghetto, which served several different functions. It was a collection and transit camp. Most who were deported here were sent on after a while to extermination camps in occupied Poland. But Theresienstadt was also a model camp, featured in German propaganda.

  The garrison town had been built by the Austrian emperor Joseph II at the end of the 1700s. In the smaller fortress adjoining the town, the most famous prisoner of the First World War had been kept—Gavrilo Princip—who in 1914 shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, triggering the outbreak of the war.

  In 1942, the SS instigated the compulsory eviction of seven thousand Czechs living in Theresienstadt in order to make space for a camp. The walls and moats that had once protected the town would now serve as the boundaries of an enormous prison. In the model camp the Jews would live in normal houses and wear everyday civilian clothes, which meant that Theresienstadt was very much like a ghetto. As in other ghettos, there was also a Judenrat, a Jewish council exerting self-governance under SS control.

  Many of the people sent to Theresienstadt were “selected Jews” from Germany, and western and northern Europe, including Jews who had previously been high-ranking civil servants or war veterans from the First World War. But the most visible and important group—from a propaganda perspective—was made up of the many artists, actors, directors, musicians, authors, academics, and other intellectuals. One of these was Isaac Leo Seeligmann, the Bible scholar and book collector from Amsterdam, who was deported here with his family.

  In German propaganda Theresienstadt was presented as “the city the Führer gave to the Jews.” For the sake of propaganda once again, the Nazis had a bank and shops opened, and built playgrounds for the children. There was even a local “camp currency” known as Theresienstadt-crowns, established to create the image of an autonomous, internal economy.

  A significant part of camp life were the many cultural activities, which were encouraged by the camp commandant and staff. In a two-story yellow stone house at the camp address L304, a library known as Ghettobücherei Theresienstadt was set up in November 1942—on the floor above it was the Freizeitgestaltung, the leisure department, which took care of various camp activities. The Freizeitgestaltung had theater performances, as well as concerts and lectures. There was no shortage of actors, musicians, and writers. Some of the most outstanding talent of the age was deported to the camp, such as the Austrian actor Jaro Fürth, the playwright Elsa Bernstein, and the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer. No fewer than five members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra were sent to Theresienstadt, including its former concertmaster Julius Stwertka.1 Even a Jewish jazz band, the Ghetto Swingers, was formed in the camp.

  When the Ghettobücherei opened in 1942, it had four thousand books, which the Nazis had plundered from places including the rabbinical seminary in Berlin. Other deliveries of books to Theresienstadt went ahead, these having been plundered from synagogues, Jewish families, churches, and Masonic orders. Yet most of the books were brought by the prisoners themselves, for with every new influx of people came more books. Of the few possessions the Jews were allowed to bring when they were deported, many chose to pack one or two of their favorite books. These were confiscated on arrival and handed over to the Ghettobücherei. Within a year, the library collection had grown to 50,000 volumes and by 1944 it comprised 120,000 books.2

  The cultural life of the camp was highlighted in Nazi propaganda. The climax of this Potemkin village was a carefully planned visit by the Red Cross in 1944. The year before, the SS had already begun preparations, implementing a “beautification process,” which included renovations of barracks, repainting of houses, and the planting of trees and flowers. The prisoners were given more substantial rations so that they looked better fed. In May, 7,503 people had also been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, to make the camp seem less crowded.

  The visit by the Red Cross came about as a result of pressure from Denmark and Sweden, and when the inspectors arrived in June 1944, Theresienstadt was an idyll of staged soccer games, concerts, and a choir of Jewish children singing for the visitors. From the square came the sound of jazz music played by the Ghetto Swingers, despite the fact that jazz had been banned in the Third Reich and was regarded as “degenerate music.” The transformation was also linguistic, as the camp changed its name from Ghetto Theresienstadt to Jüdisches Siedlungsgebiet (Jewish Settlement Area).

  In connection with the visit, work began on a propaganda film in which the camp was described as a “health resort for Jews.” Cynically enough, camp prisoners were recruited to produce the film under the leadership of the SS. Jewish prisoners were responsible for the script, direction, and music, the latter also provided by the Ghetto Swingers.3 The film, entitled Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews), was directed by the German-Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron, who had had his breakthrough in 1930 opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.

  The library made an appearance in a surviving section of the film—the librarians eagerly working on cataloging books and the chief librarian, Emil Utitz, giving a talk. In the film the library had a new name: no longer Ghettobücherei Theresienstadt, it was called the more neutral Zentralbücherei.

  However, the theatrical backdrops collapsed as soon as the inspectors from the Red Cross left the camp, and the deportations immediately resumed. Behind the image of the model ghetto there existed a concentration camp that hardly differed from any other, defined as it was by starvation, disease, slave labor, torture, and overcrowding. The Jewish film team was deported soon after wrapping in September. As for Kurt Gerron and the members of the Ghetto Swingers, they were put on the last train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz at the end of 1944.4

  Of the 144,000 Jews who were sent to Theresienstadt, just over 17,000 survived the war. About 33,000 died in the actual camp, while close to 90,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Many died in the typhoid epidemic that broke out in the camp at the end of the war. The library books helped spread the contagion from one reader to another, and tens of thousands of infected books from the Ghettobücherei eventually had to be burned. The library was also decimated by the frequent deportations toward the end: “Every train load robs us of 1,000 books, because every person brings two or three books . . . I did nothing about this,” wrote Emil Utitz.5 Although many knew, or at least had a sense of, what lay ahead, they wanted to bring a book with them for the journey.

  But there was also a secret library in Theresienstadt, which did not appear in the propaganda film. Available only to a select group, it was a library of an altogether different kind, and of a completely different value.

  • • •

  With the help of a wartime map I try to orient myself through the streets of Terezín. Traces of the camp are still discernible everywhere; on certain street corners one can make out the old “street names” painted in black letters using camp abbreviations: “Block C.V/Q2—09-15.” I walk past one of the most beautiful houses in the city, in which the camp’s Danish Jews were once housed.

  Just outside the south walls, not far from the crematorium, is a small stone house with the pointing missing along the gable. In the little garden surrounded by a rusty fence I see tomato plants, currant bushes, and vines climbing up the fortress walls. Here worked a group of people referred to by the SS as the Bücherfassungsgruppe.

  In April 1943 the SS had ordered that a special group of Jewish scholars should be assembled, composed of rabbis, theologians, lingu
ists, and historians. While other prisoners in the camp were working in a nearby mine, breaking coal, or manufacturing military uniforms, the Bücherfassungsgruppe busied itself with cataloging plundered books for the SS.6 Like the ERR, the SS was short of researchers who could read, interpret, and catalog the mountains of confiscated Jewish literature. Theresienstadt with its many Jewish academics was a resource that the SS felt obliged to use. There was also another underlying reason, namely that in the spring of 1943 the SS had begun evacuating its book depots in Berlin, because of the many air raids against the capital. Theresienstadt was one of the places chosen as a safer location.

  The Bücherfassungsgruppe was the SS equivalent of the ERR’s Paper Brigade in Vilnius, and just as in Vilnius, the working group, in ghetto slang, would go under a quite different name: Talmudkommando (Talmud Unit). In all, some forty Jewish scholars were included in the group.

  Some of the foremost Hebrew scholars in Europe were “recruited” into the Talmudkommando. The Czech Judaist and book collector Otto Muneles was selected as the head of the group. Previously, he had worked for the Jewish Museum in Prague and attended the same school as Franz Kafka. Other members of the group included Moses Woskin-Nahartabi, who had been the professor of Semitic languages at Leipzig University, as well as the historian and book collector from Amsterdam, Isaac Leo Seeligmann. His own and his father Sigmund Seeligmann’s great book collection, confiscated in 1941, had been absorbed by the RSHA library in Berlin. In 1943 the RSHA moved a part of the section on Jewish literature to Theresienstadt and placed it with the Talmudkommando.7

  Seeligmann found books from his own collection in this consignment of about sixty thousand volumes. Members of the group seem to have been plagued by the same moral dilemmas as the Paper Brigade in Vilnius. They looked for consolation in the fact that their work was preserving their Jewish heritage, although they were doing it on behalf of an organization that more than any other had to be considered responsible for the extermination of the Jewish people. The work was a balancing act between satisfying their “masters” and doing a meaningful job in its own right. They were also painfully aware that completion of the task would probably be synonymous with their own deaths. As a result, they intentionally slowed down their productivity.

  Although the Talmudkommando enjoyed a certain amount of privilege from the camp administration, there was a constant threat of deportation. The Talmudkommando was generally exempt, but the SS consciously used the sense of threat to engender a feeling of insecurity.

  In 1944 one of the foremost experts in the group, Moses Woskin-Nahartabi, was deported to Auschwitz along with his whole family.

  For others the exception could be both an escape and a curse. Otto Muneles, effectively the head of the Talmudkommando, had to witness the deportation of his entire family. As soon as Muneles learned of their fate, he volunteered to go with them, but this was denied. He continued to put his name on the list every time new deportations were announced, but his request was rejected every time.8

  The work of the Talmudkommando would continue until the SS guards abandoned the camp early in April 1945, just a few days before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. By that time the group had cataloged close to thirty thousand books, the spines carefully labeled with yellow tickets and handwritten serial numbers. The camp was left in such a hurry that the SS did not even take the books that had been cataloged and already packed into more than 250 crates.

  • • •

  At around midnight on May 31, 1942, the largest-ever hostile bomber fleet entered German airspace. It was part of a new strategy in which attacks would not only be directed at German armaments industries but also at those who worked in them—in other words, the civilian workforce. The intention was to bomb Germans in their own homes and break their appetite for continuing the war. In ninety minutes some fifteen hundred tons of bombs were dropped over medieval Cologne. Twenty-five hundred fires raged in the city, leaving fifty thousand people homeless. The operation created the model for raids during the coming years, with increasingly devastating bomb attacks on German cities. Encouraged by their success, the Western Allies started focusing their attention on Berlin, the political and administrative core of the Third Reich.

  The millions of plundered books that had been collected in warehouses all over the city were an inferno waiting to happen. The Jewish section at the RSHA’s library of the enemies of the state is estimated in 1943 to have held between 200,000 and 300,000 books, including Jewish literature from schools, synagogues, and seminaries all over Europe, as well as outstanding private collections such as those of Isaac Leo Seeligmann, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and the French-Jewish author André Maurois.9

  The inflow of books had been so great that the SS had only had time to catalog a small proportion of the confiscated Jewish literature. There were not even enough shelves to accommodate the collection, most of which was piled in enormous stacks in the rooms of the seized Freemasons’ lodge at Eisenacher Strasse in Berlin.

  In 1943 both the RSHA and the ERR began to evacuate their collections from Berlin. Not only the depots were cleared and shipped out—entire plundering operations involving sorting, cataloging, and research were also moved. In August 1943, Section VII, RSHA’s section for ideological research, relocated most of its books to various castles that the SS had at its disposal, primarily in Silesia close to the borders between Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. A part of the uncataloged collection at the Jewish department in Section VII was sent to Theresienstadt, while the rest was shipped to a castle outside Reichenberg in Bavaria. Parts of the RSHA’s section for Freemasonry literature, including the organization’s occult library, was moved to Heinrich Himmler’s favorite castle, Schlawa (today known as Sława), while archive material was moved to Wölfelsdorf (today known as Wilkanów), where the material filled a castle and a brewery.10 One of the collections evacuated to Silesia was the so-called Schwedenkiste, the archive of the Illuminati. The new headquarters were transferred to Schloss Niemes, about nine miles east of Česká Lípa. In all, the plundered collections were housed in about ten castles and fortresses in Central Europe.

  The Talmudkommando was not the first time that the RSHA had made use of intellectual slave labor. By the time the libraries began to be moved out of Berlin in 1943 there was already a Jewish group at work in Section VII, where it had spent several years cataloging the collections. As early as 1941 the SS had kidnapped eight Jewish intellectuals, who had been forced to work at Section VII’s depot on Eisenacher Strasse, one of them being Ernst Grumach, previously the professor of philology at the university in Königsberg.

  In the spring of 1943 yet another working group was set up, consisting of nineteen Jewish academics. Although they were working in central Berlin, their conditions were not much better than in a concentration camp. The Jewish workers were carefully monitored by the SD, which kept them locked up in special rooms for up to sixteen hours a day. Forbidden to talk to other Germans, they were even allocated their own “Jewish toilet.” Death threats and physical abuse were part of the daily routine, and “none among the Jewish forced labor knew when he walked into the building, which was surrounded by a high fence, whether he would come out alive,” Grumach testified.11

  Initially, Ernst Grumach’s group busied themselves with cataloging and sorting the books that came to Eisenacher Strasse from all over the occupied territories of Europe. But when the evacuations began, the work shifted to the packing and loading of books, preparing them for transport—a heavy task for which the often elderly academics were ill suited.

  In November 1943, the RAF began its bombing raids on Berlin. The most devastating of all was on the night of November 23, when Tiergarten, Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Spandau were bombed. The firestorms that followed made 175,000 people homeless. That night, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on Kurfürstendamm was hit, and today its broken steeple is one of the most famous monuments in Berlin. />
  The RSHA’s depot in Eisenacher Strasse, about half a mile from there, was also hit by bombs, and a large number of books that had not yet been evacuated caught fire. According to Grumach, most of the Jewish collections in the building were destroyed, including the libraries of the Jewish congregations of Vienna and Warsaw. The RSHA’s other book depot, a Masonic lodge on Emser Strasse, was hit by bombs.

  It was the lot of the Jewish slave laborers to save whatever remained. According to Grumach, this took place while the buildings were still on fire, and Jews were “sent into burning rooms and made to carry out heavy furniture through rooms where the ceilings were buckling and on the verge of collapsing at any moment.”12

  In spite of the fires, there were still large numbers of books in various depots, bunkers, and cellars in Berlin. The packing and removal of books would continue “right up until the Russians were drawing close to Berlin.”13 By this time the most important collections had already been evacuated, but there were still upward of half a million books in the RSHA depots when the war ended, of which many were collected by the Bergungsstelle für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken and distributed among Berlin’s libraries. Some ended up at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, where seventy years later Sebastian Finsterwalder and Detlef Bockenkamm would raise them from their obscurity.

  • • •

  In the summer of 1943, Alfred Rosenberg also began to empty his depots in both Berlin and Frankfurt. Amt Rosenberg’s headquarters lay west of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Rosenberg’s organization had swelled and bifurcated like a tree trunk; every branch had thrown out new buds, in the form of new projects, operations, and organizations. By 1943, millions of plundered books had been collected for Rosenberg’s various library projects, the most ambitious being the Jewish library of the Frankfurt institute, Zentralbibliothek der Hohen Schule, and the Ostbücherei, the library specializing in questions relating to the East.