The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  In England the sisters were placed with various foster families and continued their studies. But Christine Ellse’s father, Helmut, who was nineteen years old, was detained by the authorities.

  “When the war broke out he was arrested by the British. As far as they were concerned he was a ‘German boy’ and therefore an enemy. First he was deported to the Isle of Man, then he was put on a ship with other Germans who were going to be interned in Australia.”

  In the summer of 1940 he was secretly deported with 2,542 “enemy aliens” on the notorious ship Dunera, bound for Australia. Some two thousand of these “aliens” were Jewish refugees, men between twenty-six and sixty who had fled the Nazis in Europe. The fifty-seven-day journey on the ship was marked by the most terrible conditions:

  The ship was an over-populated hell-hole, the hammocks bumped into each other, and many of the men were forced to sleep on tables or the floor. Twenty men had to share a single bar of soap, ten men had one towel between them. . . . The latrines overflowed and dysentery spread on the ship. Physical abuse and beatings with rifle butts were daily occurrences. One refugee tried to go to the latrine at night, which was forbidden. He got a bayonet in the stomach.26

  Helmut Kobrak, later released, tried to make his way back to Europe, but the ship he boarded was commandeered by the British.

  “They threw him off in Bombay. He was twenty years old. He had no job, no money, and no home. He told me that he spent three nights walking the streets. Finally, he managed to find a job in a cotton factory, but he did not make it back to England until 1949. He never spoke about the voyage on the Dunera either; he was probably quite traumatized by it. I only found out about it when I started looking into it myself,” says Ellse.

  She tells me that the hardest thing for her father was never getting an education.

  “I don’t think he ever recovered from that. He was very gifted at school, but he had to walk away from it. He always dreamed of being a doctor. He was social, but he still had those Prussian ideals of justice and duty. I really could have imagined him as a doctor, but in the end he worked in the jewelry trade in London. He got his stimulation from reading. He was an absolute bookworm. Whenever we went anywhere on holiday he always brought a whole suitcase of books.”

  Christine Ellse’s father, Helmut, died in 1994, and only then did she start looking into her family history. Over the last ten years, with the help of Tomas Unglaube, she has been trying to form a picture of her father and her grandparents’ lives. The piles of files, folders, and loose scraps of paper from archives, all spread over her desk, are only part of the material she has managed to put together.

  “This year, Tomas has sent parcel after parcel with materials: photocopies, studies, and documents. And then we have tried to put everything together, like pieces of a puzzle. I only knew some aspects of what happened to my father because there was so much he was unwilling to talk about. Only once did he open up. It was one Christmas when I was having problems. I was very upset and I was keeping myself to myself. Then he came to me and told me about Kristallnacht. He’d only been fourteen at the time and he went on the run to avoid being arrested. He spent all night walking around between one hiding place and another.”

  Dusk is falling and, after a few hours of talking, we have decided to resume the conversation tomorrow. Her husband, Mark Ellse, keeps us company in the wintry garden and later opens a bottle of Bordeaux. He’s a talkative, retired principal shuffling about in his slippers and robe.

  “Let’s have the best wine. We have to celebrate.”

  Christine offers us venison casserole with roast potatoes and brussels sprouts. Before I retire to one of the guest rooms, she wants to show me her aunt Eva-Maria’s paintings, which are hanging all over the house—expressionistic landscape paintings in bright colors, many with motifs from the South of France.

  “She was the youngest, so she became very English. She was extremely anti-German. She never spent a single night in her life on German soil. She never wanted anything to do with Germany again.”

  Christine Ellse stands in the kitchen, immersed in a book with a wine-red binding, its pages covered from top to bottom in tiny, neat blue handwriting. It is her aunt Käthe’s war diary.

  “She kept writing it throughout the war. It starts on August 3, 1939, when she goes to England, and ends in March 1945,” says Ellse, wiping her eyes with a napkin. She says she can never read it without crying, although it has become a little easier over the years. She has put her grandfather’s olive-green book next to her, and I ask her why she wanted it.

  “Because I don’t have a single thing of his. I have my aunt’s pictures. And I have a Persian rug with a hole in it, which I inherited. I have things from my father, but I have nothing from my grandparents. And I feel very emotionally attached to them. I don’t know what I’ll do with the book. I just want to look at it. Hold it. It was important to me,” says Ellse.

  She wants to read a passage from her aunt’s diary, and she opens it on the page of the last entry, on March 31, 1945. After that she never wrote anything else, because she found out “the truth,” Ellse explains, and then starts reading:

  The Russians are occupying the whole of Eastern Prussia and almost all of Silesia. They are on Austrian territory and deep inside Czechoslovakia. This really looks like the end—but can it really be so? Do we dare hope? Can this really be true? And where will this leave you? A few days ago we heard a description of life in Theresienstadt—which by and large was consoling. We heard that thousands of people from the camp had been released into Switzerland—were even more released later? Will you be found to be among them? So many questions, so much anxiety—and the only answer is “wait and see.” As Louis Palmer says at school: “Keep believing.” Tomorrow is Easter, and that is all we can do—carry on hoping.27

  Acknowledgments

  I have never had more people to thank. So many individuals have generously contributed both their knowledge and time. For this reason, I would humbly like to offer my thanks to all those who have made this book possible, particularly the librarians, archivists, and researchers who have received me, opened up their collections and archives, and generously shared their research, opinions, and contacts.

  I want to thank the librarians and researchers who took me in during my visits to Germany, not least Sebastian Finsterwalder and Detlef Bockenkamm at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek in Berlin, whose devoted and tireless work to return the library’s hundreds of thousands of plundered books I greatly admire. I also want to thank the art historian Uwe Hartmann from the Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung in Berlin; as well as Michael Knoche, Rüdiger Haufe, and Heike Krokowski at the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, and Stephan Kellner at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.

  In the Netherlands, I want to give particular thanks to Frits J. Hoogewoud, previously the librarian of Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, whose investigations into the plunder of Amsterdam’s Jewish libraries have been invaluable—and who has also offered many important viewpoints on my work. Further, I wish to thank Wout Visser at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Heide Warncke at Ets Haim, and Huub Sanders at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale. Great thanks are also due to Jac Piepenbrock and Theo Walter at the Cultureel Masonniek Centrum, who initiated me into the secrets of the Freemasons and the exciting history of Bibliotheca Klossiana.

  In Paris, I would like to thank the chief curator and archivist of Alliance Israélite Universelle’s library, Jean-Claude Kuperminc, who offered me the opportunity to return for several visits. A warm thanks also goes out to the custodian and librarian of Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev, Hélène Kaplan, who generously provided me with an unforgettable meeting and shared the tragic fate of her library. My sincere thanks also goes to Witold Zahorski at the Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris and Marek Sroka, historian and librarian at the University of Illinois, who contributed with supporting material
on the Polish libraries.

  For assistance during my work in Rome, I wish to thank Dario Tedeschi, who led the Italian governmental commission to recover the lost Biblioteca Comunità Israelitica, and Gisèle Lèvy at the Centro Bibliografico, who deepened my understanding of the thrilling and rich literary history of the Italian Jews.

  In Thessaloniki, I want to thank Erika Perahia Zemour at the Jewish Museum, also the independent researcher Paul Isaac Hagouel, who generously allowed me to partake of his unparalleled research material on the city’s Jewish history. And, in Vilnius, I would like to extend special thanks to Faina Kuklainsky, the chief of Lithuania’s Jewish congregation, who received me with open arms.

  In the Czech Republic, I owe a great deal to the librarian Michal Bušek, who welcomed me to the Jewish Museum in Prague and whose investigations into the library units in Theresienstadt were exceptionally valuable. Thanks also to Tomáš Fedorovič at Terezín’s historical section and Renata Košťálová at the Documentation Centre, who added insights into the plundering operation in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War.

  I would like to thank those whose stories, for various reasons, never found a place in the book. Particular thanks must go to Dr. Christine Sauer at the Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus in Nuremburg, Christina Köstner-Pemsel at the Fachbereichsbibliothek Zeitgeschichte Universität in Vienna, and Margot Werner at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

  I would like to extend warm thanks to Christine Ellse, grandchild of Richard Kobrak, who welcomed me into her home in Cannock outside Birmingham and allowed me to share in her family history.

  An enormous debt is owed to Patricia Grimsted Kennedy, research associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and an honorary Fellow of the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). No one has done more to illuminate and detail the libraries and archives that were dispersed during the Second World War. The essays, articles, and contacts she contributed were of huge importance to me. Of equal importance were her many books on the subject, which are required reading for anyone wishing to go more deeply into this complicated question. I would especially recommend Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (2001), and Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues (2013).

  I also wish to thank those who have worked to ensure that the process has resulted in a book: My publisher Norstedts, and particularly my publisher Stefan Skog, who believed in the book from our very first meeting. Also my two excellent editors, Ingemar Karlsson and Malin Tynderfeldt.

  Last but not least, I would like to thank those who have in a variety of ways assisted with views and fact-checking. Thanks to the writer Artur Szulcs for wide-ranging remarks on the book. Thanks to Andreas Önnerfors, university reader at the Department of Literature and the History of Ideas at Gothenburg University, for his valuable insights into the history of the Freemasons. And thanks to Anders Burman, lecturer in the History of Ideas at Södertörns högskola; Erik Tängerstad, teacher at the Department of History and Contemporary Studies at Södertörns högskola; and Staffan Lundgren, publisher at Axl Books and editor of SITE, who all offered important insights into Weimar Classicism, German Idealism, and Goethe.

  For grants and support that in various ways have made this project possible, I wish to thank Författarfonden, Natur & Kultur, and the San Michele Foundation.

  Anders Rydell, June 2015

  Notes

  1: A Fire That Consumes the World: Berlin

  1.Todd Kontje, The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 73–74.

  2.E. Leonidas Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature, 1933–1945,” p. 12, in The Holocaust and the Book (ed. Jonathan Rose), Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

  3.Völkischer Beobachter, April 14, 1933.

  4.Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature, 1933–1945,” p. 14.

  5.Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003, p. 97.

  6.Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature, 1933–1945,” p. 14.

  7.Jan-Pieter Barbian, The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 169.

  8.Jay Worthington, “Mein Royalties,” Cabinet issue 10, 2003. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/mein_royalties.php.

  9.Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature, 1933–1945,” p. 16.

  10.Joseph Goebbels, Völkischer Beobachter, May 12, 1933.

  11.Stefan Zweig, Varlden av i gar, trans. Hugo Hultenberg, Stockholm: Ersatz, 2011, p. 395.

  12.Guy Stern, “The Burning of the Books in Nazi Germany, 1933: The American Response,” Simon Wiesenthal Annual, vol. 2, ch. 5.

  13.Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Immediate American Responses to the Nazi Book Burnings,” https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007169, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2014.

  14.Christoph Daxelmüller, “Nazi Concept of Culture and the Erasure of Jewish Folklore,” p. 79, The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994.

  2: Ghosts at Berliner Stadtbibliothek: Berlin

  1.Rudi Joelsohn, memorial book. https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/intro.html.en.

  2.Akt nummer 512–515 och 515/1. Inventarienummer C Rep. 120. Landesarchiv, Berlin.

  3.Sebastian Finsterwalder and Peter Prölls, “Tracing the Rightful Owners: Nazi-Looted Books in the Central and Regional Library of Berlin,” in ‘The West’ Versus ‘The East’ or The United Europe?, Proceedings of an international academic conference held in Poděbrady on October 8–9, 2013, ed. Mečislav Borák. https://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/grimsted-podebradyessay13.pdf. Documentation Centre for Property Transfers of Cultural Assets of WWII Victims, Prague, 2014. pp. 92–102.

  4.Melonie Magruder, “A Holocaust Survivor’s Childhood Book Comes Home,” Malibu Times, July 22, 2009.

  5.Michael Sontheimer, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft: German Libraries Hold Thousands of Looted Volumes,” Der Spiegel, October 24, 2008. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/retracing-the-nazi-book-theft-german-libraries-hold-thousands-of-looted-volumes-a-586379-2.html.

  6.Heike Pudler and Michaela Scheibe, “Provenienzforschung/-erschließung an der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin,” Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis, vol. 34, April 2010, pp. 51–56.

  7.Cornelia Briel, Beschlagnahmt, erpresst, erbeutet. NS-Raubgut, Reichstauschstelle und Preusische Staatsbibliothek zwischen 1933 und 1945, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013.

  8.Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003, p. 99.

  9.Briel, Beschlagnahmt, erpresst, erbeutet.

  10.Sontheimer, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft.”

  11.Regine Dehnel, “Perpetrators, Victims, and Art: The National Socialists’ Campaign of Pillage,” Eurozine, September 26, 2007. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-09-26-dehnel-en.html.

  12.Knuth, Libricide, p. 99.

  13.Ibid.

  14.Michael Dobbs, “Epilogue to a Story of Nazi-Looted Books; Library of Congress Trove of War Propaganda Included Many Stolen Jewish Works,” Washington Post, January 5, 2000.

  15.Sontheimer, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft.”

  3: Goethe’s Oak: Weimar

  1.White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama, German Chancellor Merkel, and Elie Wiesel at Buchenwald Concentration Camp,” June 5, 2009. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-german-chancellor-merkel-and-elie-wiesel-
buchenwald-concent.

  2.David A. Hackett (ed.), Der Buchenwald-Report: Bericht uber das Konzentrationslager Buchenwald bei Weimar, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010, p. 188.

  3.Klaus Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, p. 179.

  4.Ernst Wiechert, I dodens skog, trans. Irma Nordvang, pp. 119–120. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1946.

  5.Prisoner no. 4935, “Über die Goethe-Eiche im Lager Buchenwald.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 4, 2006. http://www.nzz.ch/articleEMAWX-1.73138.

  6.Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 10.

  7.Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 4.

  8.Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 157.

  9.Peter Gay, Weimarkulturen 1918–1933, trans. Per Lennart Mansson, Nova, Sweden: Nya Doxa, 2003, pp. 22–23.

  10.Ibid., p. 24.

  11.Ingemar Karlsson and Arne Ruth, Samhallet som teater, Stockholm: Liber, 1983, p. 56.

  12.Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Literature and Film in the Third Reich, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003, pp. 3–6.

  13.Manfred Görtemaker, Thomas Mann und die Politik, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2005, p. 51.

  14.E. Alan Steinweis, “Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism,” Central European History, vol. 24, no. 4, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 402–14.

  15.W. Daniel Wilson, “Goethe and the Nazis,” Times Literary Supplement, March 14, 2014.