Anders Rydell - The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

L ast spring, I found myself sitting on a plane from Berlin to Birmingham with a small olive-green book in my rucksack. From time to time I opened the rucksack and the brown padded envelope in which the book was kept, just to reassure myself that it was still there. After more than seventy years it was going to be returned to its family, to a grandchild of the man who had once owned it. A man who had carefully glued his ex libris to a flyleaf and written his name on the title page: Richard Kobrak. At the end of 1944 he was deported with his wife to the gas chambers, on one of the last trains to Auschwitz. The little book in my rucksack is not especially valuable; in a secondhand bookshop in Berlin it would probably not cost much more than a few euros.

And yet, in the few days that I have been the guardian of the book, I have been plagued by what almost amounts to panic at the thought of its suddenly going missing. I have had anguished fantasies about forgetting my rucksack in a taxi, or having it stolen. The value of the book is not monetary, but emotional, and it is irreplaceable to those who grew up without their grandfather. The little olive-green book holds enormous value because it is the only remaining possession of Richard Kobrak. A book from a mans library. Tragically, it is only one of millions still waiting to be found. Millions of forgotten books from millions of lost lives. For more than half a century they have been ignored and rendered mute. Those who were aware of their origins often tried to erase the memory of their owners, tearing out any pages with labels, crossing out personal dedications and falsifying library catalogs, in which gifts from the Gestapo or the Nazi Party were substituted by mentions of anonymous donors.

But many have survived, perhaps because the plunder was far too widespread and there was no great desire to look into the history of these remnants.

The story of the Nazis art thefts has been given great attention in the last few decades. In 2009 I began writing about it myself, basing my inquiries on a painting at Moderna Museet in Stockholm that was known to have disappeared during the Second World WarEmil Noldes Blumengarten(Utenwarf). Just like the olive-green book, it belonged to a German-Jewish family and was lost at the end of the 1930s. My initial subject later turned into the story of the Nazis large-scale looting of art and the long, seventy-year battle to reclaim these works, my efforts eventually resulting in a book, published in 2013: The PlunderersHow the Nazis Stole Europes Art Treasures.

As I immersed myself in the details of this theft driven equally by ideology and greed, I learned that not only art and antiquities were stolen, but also books. There was nothing curious about this in itselfthe Nazi plundering organizations grabbed whatever they could.

The first thing I marveled at was the sheer scale of it, the fact that tens of millions of books disappeared in a plundering operation stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Black Sea. But something else also caught my attention, namely that the books seemed much more important on an ideological level. The art was distributed mainly among the Nazi leadership, not least Adolf Hitler and Hermann Gring themselves. This art was intended to show, legitimize, and impart honor on the new world the Nazis intended to build on the ruins of Europe. A more beautiful, cleaner world, as they saw it.

But the books served another purpose. They were stolen not for honor and not only out of greed eitherbut rather for even more disturbing reasons. Libraries and archives all over Europe were plundered by the most important ideologues of the Third Reich, by organizations led by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, or the partys chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. The greatest book theft in history was orchestrated and implemented during the war. The targets of this plunder were the ideological enemies of the movementJews, Communists, Freemasons, Catholics, regime critics, Slavs, and so on. This story is not widely known today, and its crimes are still largely unsolved. I decided to follow the trail of the looters, on a journey measuring thousands of miles through Europe. I did this partly to try to understand but also to find out what remainsand what was lost. I went from the scattered migr libraries in Paris, to the lost, ancient Jewish library in Rome, its origins reaching back to the very beginning of our epoch. And then, from hunting for the secrets of the Freemasons in The Hague to the search for fragments of an eradicated civilization in Thessaloniki. Or from the Sephardic libraries of Amsterdam to the Yiddish libraries of Vilnius. There were traces everywhere, though oftentimes very few: places where people and their books were dispersed and in many cases destroyed.

This is to a very great extent a story of dispersalabout the thousands of libraries forever scattered during the Second World War. Millions of individual books, once forming a part of collections, are still on shelves all over Europe. But they have lost their context. Fragments of once fantastic libraries built up over generations and forming the cultural, linguistic, and identity-defining heart of communities, families, and individuals. Libraries that were irreplaceable in their own righta reflection of the people and societies that once created and nurtured them.

But this is also a book about the people who waged a war to defend their literary inheritance, putting their own lives in the balance and sometimes losing them as a result. These people were well aware that the theft of their literary culture was a way of robbing them of their history, their humanity, and, in the final analysis, any possibility of remembrance. These were people who desperately tried to hide their manuscripts, buried their diaries, and held on to their one, most beloved book on their last journey to Auschwitz. We owe thanks to these people for our ability to recall the terrible things that took placeboth those who lost their lives and those who survived and have since then described their experiences in order to inform the world. They added words to what was intended to remain unspoken. We are living in a time when the last Holocaust survivors will soon be passing away. We can only hope that what they have given us will be enough for us to continue remembering. When I wrote this book I realized that these memories are central, they were the very reason for the book plundering. Robbing people of words and narrative is a way of imprisoning them.