The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Hundreds of trophy libraries were split up, and single copies of books were distributed to libraries all over the Soviet Union. Even this distribution was fraught with problems, as the libraries tended to receive books on haphazardly chosen subjects and in languages that the readers often did not understand. A Soviet postwar report describes how a workers’ library at a chemical factory received books on ancient Greek literature, while another took delivery of confiscated French fashion magazines. Once or twice portraits of Adolf Hitler were even sent to workplaces.20 The distribution was so chaotic that even Soviet librarians at this time began to question the purpose of the whole process. How many of these often damaged books were removed and discarded during the postwar years, no one knows. Books also had to be subjected to a political assessment, and “politically dangerous,” “decadent,” or “bourgeois” literature was removed.

  The fate of the Turgenev Library from Paris was not entirely atypical. Like many other collections, the library was scattered. Some of the books ended up in Moscow, but the greater part of the collection was sent to Minsk. Half of the collection, about sixty thousand books, was sent to one of the Red Army officers clubs in Legnica, south of Mysłowice—the headquarters of the army in Silesia.21 It seems to have been a mistake, a result of the chaos that characterized the whole operation.

  When the mistake was discovered, the finer parts of the collection, such as manuscripts, first editions, and books with signatures and dedications by famous authors, were fetched and taken to the Lenin Library in Moscow. Especially, books with references to Lenin and Bunin were separated. But most of the collection remained in Legnica. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a Russian officer, Vladimir Sashonko, who was stationed there in the mid-1950s, revealed what had happened to the books.

  According to Sashonko there were many books in the library that carried the stamp “Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev—Rue du Val-de-Grâce 9.” One day a lieutenant who was in charge of the library explained that they “had received orders from Moscow to burn the books in the fireplace.” Sashonko saved one book from the collection, which he took home with him as a souvenir, but the rest of the books were destroyed: “Slowly, the Turgenev Library was reduced to smoke and ashes, which settled over Legnica . . . sharing the tragic fate of the millions of unfortunates who went under in the concentration camps of the Fascists, and were burned in the crematoria.”22

  • • •

  Early in May 1945, Alfred Rosenberg wandered along the edge of Flensburg Fjord, on the border with Denmark. The fjord, which defines the most westerly point of the Baltic Sea, is a very beautiful place in May, and popular with boaters. The war seemed remote, almost. Rosenberg had left Berlin, bombed to smithereens, at the very last moment. He had checked into a hotel room in Flensburg, one of the few cities in Germany that was more or less undamaged by the war. Flensburg was the place where Nazi Germany’s last government had established itself under Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. On May 7, 1945, Dönitz had finally put his name to the capitulation of the Third Reich. Rosenberg, as he walked there at the water’s edge, was considering how he should meet his own fate. Suicide would certainly have been in his thoughts, as it was for so many other leading Nazis. In his pocket he carried ampoules of cyanide.

  Over the course of that last year, Rosenberg had watched his empire crumbling. After the Red Army reconquered the Soviet territories, Rosenberg’s National Ministry for the Occupied East was nothing more than a semantic device. His once enormous kingdom in the east, and the dreams tied to this, had bit by bit been reduced to nothing, first by Hitler and then by Stalin. The enemy he feared more than any other, the regime he had made it his mission to fight, which had stolen his Estonia, was now also engulfing the German fatherland.

  In February 1944, Rosenberg had visited his Ostland for the last time, in his private train, Gotenland. But he had not even reached Reval before Hitler called him back. During his absence, his headquarters in Berlin had been destroyed in a bombing raid. After that time, Rosenberg had to hold court in his train, parked in a Berlin suburb. He continued working in the spring on his plans for the congress in Kraków, but even this was snatched away from him in the summer when Hitler canceled all further planning for the event.23 Repeatedly he tried to get a meeting with the Führer, whom he had not seen one-to-one since November 1943. However, access to Hitler was absolutely controlled by another of his enemies—Martin Bormann. Rosenberg’s constant complaints about the regime’s policy toward the East had created a rift with the Führer and the rest of the leadership. Hitler had appointed Erich Koch, earlier the Reich commissioner in the Ukraine, to apply similarly brutal methods in the exploitation and plundering of the Baltic region. Rosenberg was under strict orders not to interfere with Koch’s work.

  Rosenberg’s attempts to get to his Führer failed, even when he tried to get past Bormann by going directly to Hitler’s female secretary. In October he decided to give it all up, and he wrote an embittered letter in which he resigned from his post as Reich Minister for the Occupied East. Hitler never replied. During the last months of the war, Rosenberg lived in the cellar of his family’s house, from which the roof had been blown off in a bombing raid. Rosenberg spent his time digging in his vegetable patch, planting various greens, which, as he must have known, he was highly unlikely ever to harvest.

  Hitler saw Rosenberg one last time during a meeting with the leaders in February 1945, when the Führer spoke of a “secret weapon” that would earn their victory. It was the final straw, to which fanatical National Socialists clung as the downfall came closer. The two men did not speak, and Rosenberg had no faith in Hitler’s miracle weapon.

  In March, Rosenberg was visited by the leader of the Hitler Youth, Artur Axmann, who was planning to dig in and conduct guerrilla war in the Alps. He tried to win over Rosenberg, but the chief ideologue had already given up. Axmann asked Rosenberg what had really gone wrong, was it the National Socialist idea itself or its interpretation? Rosenberg chose to blame it on his party comrades: “I told him it was a great idea that had been abused by small men. Himmler was the evil symbol of all that,” he wrote in his posthumously published settlement of accounts with Hitler, Grossdeutschland, Traum und Tragödie.24 On a personal level, Rosenberg had resigned in the face of the constant rejection he had had to endure from Hitler. But in his private thoughts, Rosenberg seems to have retained his ideology without the slightest doubt.

  On April 20, Rosenberg had been ordered to leave Berlin, even though he had declared that he was willing to stay on until the end—but, like an abandoned dog, faced with the last command he was ever given by the Führer, he set off. During his walk along the beautiful shore close to Flensburg, a few weeks later, Rosenberg finally took his cyanide ampoules out of his pocket and threw them into the sea. He had decided to meet with his vanquishers.25

  Heinrich Himmler had no such plans. He had shaved off his mustache, put on an eye patch, changed his uniform, and taken the name of Heinrich Hitzinger—but he was quickly arrested on suspicion by British troops and confessed his identity shortly thereafter. By means of a hidden ampoule in his mouth he committed suicide on May 23 in a camp outside Lüneburg, south of Hamburg.

  Alfred Rosenberg returned to his hotel and wrote a letter of surrender to the commander of the British forces, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

  Rosenberg was placed under arrest and taken to Kiel to be interrogated. Both Stalin and Churchill had advocated summary execution of the Nazi leadership. Furthermore, during the Allied conference in Tehran in 1943, Stalin had suggested that between 50,000 and 100,000 German officers should be shot—a suggestion that Roosevelt tried to make light of. In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory grew imminent, there was increasing support for the idea of an international trial of the German war criminals. After negotiations between the Allies, these trials opened on November 19, 1945, in Nuremberg, the town where the National Socialists ha
d once held their annual rallies.

  Alfred Rosenberg was one of twenty-three high-ranking Nazis in the dock. Four of the most serious charges were leveled by the prosecution at the former chief of ideology: planning of offensive war, disturbance of the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Rosenberg proclaimed himself innocent on all four counts.

  While the Nuremberg trials were under way, the Western Allies had already begun the work of trying to impose some order on the chaos created by Rosenberg’s plundering operations. Placed in trust of this task was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) program, better known as the Monuments Men—a special unit of the Western Allied army, whose brief was to protect the European cultural legacy. The war was being fought on two fronts. After the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944, the unit would spend most of its time saving monuments and cultural treasures from its own troops, who often did not even know what they were firing at. After the invasion of Germany, it turned more to the processing of enormous quantities of plundered art, antiquities, and books, which were found in warehouses, mines, barns, castles, and caves.

  The Monuments Men set up a number of depots for the sorting and identification of recovered treasure. Stolen art, antiquities, and other artifacts were collected in the Nazi Party buildings in Munich. The Rothschild Library in Frankfurt was an early collection point, but the sheer quantity of books soon meant that the unit had to start looking for bigger premises. They found a suitable space in Offenbach am Main, a suburb of Frankfurt where the German industrial giant IG Farben had its head office. The conglomerate’s headquarters, the largest office complex in Europe, was made into a new central depot for stolen books and archives: the Offenbach Archival Depot. The task of running the operation was given to a gifted archivist from the National Archives in Washington, Seymour J. Pomrenze, who arrived in Frankfurt in February 1946 while the city was being battered by a blizzard.26 Pomrenze was of Jewish origin, and his family had fled the Ukraine in the early 1920s. He was faced with an enormous task in Offenbach:

  My first impressions of the Offenbach Collecting Point were overwhelming and amazing at once. As I stood before a seemingly endless sea of crates and books, I thought what a horrible mess! What could I do with all these materials? How could I carry out my assignment successfully? Beyond the mess, however, was an even larger mission. Indeed, the only action possible was to return the items to their owners as quickly as possible.27

  Pomrenze had been recruited by another MFAA participant, the librarian Leslie I. Poste, who was the brains behind the Offenbach Archival Depot. Ever since the arrival of the unit in Europe in 1943, the Monuments Men had focused their efforts on saving art, monuments, and historically important buildings. Libraries had not been given any great attention until Poste was hired in 1945. Prior to Pomrenze’s arrival, Poste had spent almost half a year driving tens of thousands of miles, criss-crossing Europe through the ruins of the Third Reich, looking for plundered libraries and archives.

  Pomrenze organized a workforce of two hundred archivists, librarians, and workers at the Offenbach Archival Depot, who started plowing their way through the “endless sea” of books. Security was tight, and everyone was frisked before leaving at the end of the day, although Pomrenze conceded that thefts did take place, especially smaller books that were easy to hide. The Monuments Men developed a sort of conveyor-belt system of identifying books, with ex librises and other owners’ marks photographed. A less qualified group of the workforce kept photographs of the more common ex librises while they were sifting through the books. More unusual marks were sent on to be examined by experts. In this way, enormous piles of books could quickly be divided up into piles of identified and unidentified volumes. In the case of the former, they were immediately packed and sent off to officers in charge of restitution in the relevant country.28

  Thousands of photographs of ex libris marks, the result of this work, are still kept in the National Archives in Washington. Already by March 1946, Pomrenze’s group at the Offenbach Archival Depot had sorted some 1.8 million objects. And that same month some of the collections began to be sent back. However, the restitution process was not complete. The Western Allied armies, wanting the question out of their hair as quickly as possible, advocated a simple restitution model of returning each collection to the government of the country in which it was stolen. The model worked fairly well in cases of large, fairly integrated collections that belonged to established institutions.

  Two libraries that were returned already by the spring of 1946 were Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana and Ets Haims from Amsterdam. Both had been found in Hungen still in the crates in which the ERR had packed them. Because these libraries had not been moved to Germany until 1943 and 1944, the Frankfurt institute had never had the time to check through the collections, and they were probably taken directly to storage in Hungen. By March the first consignment was sent to Amsterdam, but it was a return overshadowed by sorrow, as it had emerged that Rosenthaliana’s previous curator, Louis Hirschel, had died in Poland with his entire family. Not many were left alive of the Jewish intellectual circle of scholarly librarians and biblical researchers who had once been such a fixture of the library. The choice for Hirschel’s successor fell on a survivor of Theresienstadt’s Talmudkommando: Isaac Leo Seeligmann.

  For Seeligmann, who had lost his own collection, and for Amsterdam, which had lost a large proportion of its Jewish population, the appointment was a sort of consolation, even if rather a small one. Yet, with the return of the library to Amsterdam, a portion of the city’s Jewish cultural identity was also revived.29 Without these collections, a significant part of four hundred years of Jewish religious, intellectual, and economic history in “Jeruzalem van het Westen” would have been lost.

  A more notable return were the collections that had belonged to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Because of the internal tug-of-war, the IISG’s library and archive had left the Netherlands relatively late, in 1943 and 1944, which meant that a fair share of it was still packed in crates. Some of the material had been evacuated so late that it was found loaded on ferries in northern Germany. Hundreds of boxes were found in Hungen and at Tanzenberg Castle in Austria, where ZBHS had moved its collections. The latter were handed back by the British army, which had set up a similar restitution operation as the one in Offenbach.

  However, some IISG material ended up in Stalin’s special archive in Moscow.30 The institute’s archive, with its focus on the workers’ movement, trade unions, and Socialist leaders, was of particular interest to the Soviet Union. At the Amsterdam institute there was for a long time a belief that the missing archives and books had been destroyed during the war. It took almost fifty years before it emerged that this was not the case. When I met him at the IISG, Huub Sanders recounted, “The miraculous part is that most of the archive came back after the war. The loss, in the end, was fairly small, just around 5 percent. What was lost was taken to the Soviet Union, which is also where the Trotsky papers are that were taken by the Soviet secret service in the 1930s.”

  Another Dutch library that would come back almost intact was Klossiana, the collection of the Masonic order of Grootoosten der Nederlanden in The Hague. The collection was returned to the Offenbach Archival Depot in 1946. But some of the archives of the order disappeared, and long afterward it was shown that they had been absorbed by the Stalin archive.

  If the Netherlands libraries were lucky, the same could not be said of the French. In addition to the Turgenev Library, the Symon Petljura Library was lost and seems to have met a similar end by dispersal. The archives ended up both in Kiev and Stalin’s trophy archive, where the material was kept in the section reserved for “Ukrainian nationalists.”31

  The exception was the Polish émigré library, Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris. There is still a lack of clarity about where this library was on the cessation of hostilities—in East Germany or Poland. Either way
, the collection fell into Polish hands and, in 1945, was brought to the National Library in Warsaw. Most likely the library was saved from the attentions of the trophy brigades because it was mistaken for “Polish property.” After long-drawn-out negotiations and diplomatic pressure, the Polish exiles in Paris managed to take back a part of the collection in 1947. But it was not a complete library that was sent back. Of the 136,000 volumes that originally made up the collection, only 42,592 books, 878 manuscripts, 85 drawings, and 1,229 journals came back. The rest disappeared.32

  When the coworkers at Alliance Israélite Universelle went back to the headquarters of the organization at 45 rue la Bruyère in Paris, the building was far from empty. The shelves in the library were still full of books; however, these were not the Alliance’s own books but plundered collections left by the ERR. Instead, parts of the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle were found at Offenbach Archival Depot and in Tanzenberg.