The Book Thieves Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Anders Rydell

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Henning Koch

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  Originally published in Swedish as Boktjuvarna by Norstedts, Stockholm.

  Photographs by Anders Rydell

  ISBN 9780735221222 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735221246 (eBook)

  Version_1

  To Alva, my love and inspiration

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1: A Fire That Consumes the World: Berlin

  2: Ghosts at Berliner Stadtbibliothek: Berlin

  3: Goethe’s Oak: Weimar

  4: Himmler’s Library: Munich

  5: A Warrior Against Jerusalem: Chiemsee

  6: Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel: Amsterdam

  7: The Hunt for the Secrets of the Freemasons: The Hague

  8: Lenin Worked Here: Paris

  9: The Lost Library: Rome

  10: Fragments of a People: Thessaloniki

  11: The Mass Grave Is a Paper Mill: Vilnius

  12: The Talmud Unit: Theresienstadt

  13: “Jewish Studies Without Jews”: Ratibor–Frankfurt

  14: A Wagon of Shoes: Prague

  15: A Book Finds Its Way Home: Berlin–Cannock

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Foreword

  Last 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 man’s 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 War—Emil Nolde’s 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 Plunderers—How the Nazis Stole Europe’s 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 itself—the 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 Göring 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 either—but 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 party’s 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 movement—Jews, 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 remains—and what was lost. I went from the scattered émigré 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 dispersal—about 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 right—a 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 place—both those who lost their lives and those who survived and have since then described their expe
riences 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.

  Books are rarely unique in the same way as works of art, but they have a value that so many more people can understand. In our time, the book has retained a symbolic value that is almost spiritual. Discarding books is still considered sacrilegious. The burning of books is one of the strongest symbolic actions there is, correlating with cultural destruction. While mainly identified with the Nazi book pyres of 1933, the symbolic destruction of literature is as old as the book itself.

  The strong relationship between humans and books relates to the role of the written word in the dissemination of knowledge, feeling, and experience over thousands of years. Gradually the written word replaced the oral tradition. We could preserve more and look further back in time. We could satisfy our never quite satisfied hunger for more. The ability to read and write, until quite recently the preserve of a few, was therefore associated with magical abilities. Whoever had mastery of such knowledge could commune with our ancestors—and possessed knowledge, authority, and power. Our simultaneously emotional and spiritual relationship to the book is about how the book “speaks to us.” It is a medium connecting us to other people both living and dead.

  American slaves, long prevented from learning to read, referred to the Bible—used by the white slave owners as a means of justifying their captivity—as “The Talking Book.” An important part of their liberation came about when they appropriated the Bible and used it against their oppressors. The book was an instrument of both repression and liberation. Even today, the interpretation of holy writings lies at the very core of global conflicts. The book does not only transfer knowledge and emotions—it is a source of power.

  This is often something that has been obscured by the smoke of the infamous book burnings in Germany in 1933—when works of authors loathed by the regime were thrown into the flames. The image of Nazis as anti-intellectual, cultural vandals has been persistent, possibly to some degree because it is easy to comprehend, and possibly because we would like to see literature and the written word as fundamentally good.

  But even the Nazis realized that if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it. There was a power in books. Words could act as weapons, resounding long after the rumbling of artillery had stopped. They are weapons not only as propaganda, but also in the form of memories. Whoever owns the word has the power to not only interpret it, but also to write history.

  [ 1 ]

  A FIRE THAT CONSUMES THE WORLD

  Berlin

  Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.

  —Heinrich Heine, 1820

  These words are engraved on a rusty red metal plate sunk into the cobblestones of Bebelplatz in Berlin. Berlin’s summer tourists wander past the square, situated between Brandenburger Tor and Museumsinsel, on their way to see one of the city’s more grandiose sights. The location still holds symbolic tension. In one corner of the square stands an elderly woman with tousled white hair. She has wrapped herself in a big Israeli flag—the Star of David across her back. Another war has broken out in Gaza. Some thirty people have gathered to demonstrate against the anti-Semitic sentiments that, seventy years after the Second World War, are once more reawakening in Europe.

  On the other side of the broad, fashionable thoroughfare of Unter den Linden, trestle tables have been put out in front of the gates of Humboldt University. For a few euros one can buy well-thumbed copies of books by Thomas Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and Stefan Zweig—all authors whose works were thrown into the fire here in May 1933. In front of the tables is a row of cobblestone-size metal plates. Each plate bears a name: Max Bayer, Marion Beutler, Alice Victoria Berta, all of whom once studied at the university. After each name is a date, with a place-name that needs no further explanation: “Mauthausen 1941,” “Auschwitz 1942,” “Theresienstadt 1945.”

  Heinrich Heine’s words, actually a line of dialogue from the play Almansor, have since the Second World War been seen as an insightful prophecy of what came to pass here, and the catastrophe that would follow. On May 10, 1933, in Bebelplatz, which at that time was known as Opernplatz, history’s most famous ceremony of book burning was staged—an event that has remained a powerful symbol of totalitarian oppression, cultural barbarism, and the merciless ideological war waged by the Nazis. The flames of the book-burning pyre have also come to symbolize the intimate connection between cultural destruction and the Holocaust.

  Earlier that same spring, the Nazis had assumed power in Germany using another fire—the Reichstag fire in February 1933—as a pretext. The Nazis claimed it was the work of Communists and that Germany was threatened by a “Bolshevik plot,” and set in motion the first extensive wave of terror, arresting Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and others in political opposition. These accusations were fueled by the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, which had been stirring and agitating for years against Jewish, Bolshevik, pacifist, and cosmopolitan literature, setting the stage for the Nazis’ ascendance.

  The Nazis had been sabotaging cultural events since before 1933—everything from “displeasing” film screenings to exhibitions of so-called degenerate art came under attack. In October 1930, Thomas Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize the previous year, attacked the prevailing mood in an open reading held at the Beethoven Hall in Berlin.1 Joseph Goebbels, tipped off about what was in the offing, had sent twenty Brownshirts from the party’s SA storm troops to the reading, all in black tie to blend in with the audience, a group that included some right-wing intellectuals. Mann’s speech was met with applause from some sections of the audience, and heckling from the saboteurs. Eventually the atmosphere grew so inflamed that Mann was forced to leave the premises by the back entrance.

  Threats were even more widespread. The Mann family and writers such as Arnold Zweig and Theodor Plievier had been receiving a constant stream of threatening telephone calls and letters. The homes of writers were vandalized with graffiti. And selected writers were subjected to individual monitoring by SA patrols that waited outside their houses and followed them wherever they went.

  Lists of objectionable literature were produced. In August 1932, the Völkischer Beobachter published a blacklist of writers who should be banned once the party assumed power.2 Early that same year, a declaration had been published in the same newspaper, supported by the signatures of forty-two German professors, demanding that German literature should be protected against “cultural Bolshevism.” In the winter of 1933, when the Nazis took power, the focus attack against objectionable literature shifted away from the street and into the machinery of state. In February 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg signed a law “for the protection of people and state,” which imposed restrictions on printed publications—further amendments in the spring of the same year imposed more controls on freedom of expression. The first casualties were Communist and Social Democrat newspapers and publishers. Hermann Göring was charged with leading the battle against so-called dirty literature: Marxist, Jewish, and pornographic books.

  It was this attack on literature that led up to the book burnings in May—but in fact the initiative did not come from the Nazi Party, but rather from the Deutsche Studentenschaft—an umbrella organization of German student federations. Several of these student federations had more or less openly been supporting the Nazis since the 1920s. It was not the first time in the interwar period that German right-wing conservative students had made book pyres. In 1922 hundreds of students gathered at the Tempelhof airfield in Berlin to burn “dirty literature,” and
in 1920 students in Hamburg burned a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, the terms of surrender that Germany had been forced to sign after the First World War.

  The Nazi Party’s attack on literature fed into attacks already being carried out by groups of conservative, right-wing students. For these student groups, book burnings were a German tradition of defiance and resistance going back to the days of Martin Luther and the Reformation. In April 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft announced an action against “un-German literature,” casting Adolf Hitler as a new Luther. To evoke the Ninety-five Theses with which Luther began the Reformation, the student federation published its own “theses” in the Völkischer Beobachter—twelve theses “Wider den undeutschen Geist!” (Against the un-German Spirit).

  The students argued that language held the true soul of a people and that German literature for this reason had to be “purified” and liberated from foreign influence. They stated that the Jew was the worst enemy of the German language: “A Jew can only think in a Jewish way. If he writes in German he is lying. The German who writes in German but thinks in an un-German way is a traitor.”3 The students demanded that all “Jewish literature” should be published in Hebrew and “the un-German spirit eradicated from public libraries.” German universities, according to the students, should be “strongholds for the traditions of the German people.”

  Their proclamation was the beginning of a national action to clean out “un-German” literature. Student associations subordinated to Deutsche Studentenschaft at German universities and formed “war committees” to organize coordinated book burnings all over Germany. The book burnings were to be manifested as celebratory events, and the committees were exhorted to market their events, sign up speakers, collect wood for the fires, and seek support from other student federations and their local Nazi leadership. Those who opposed this work, especially teachers, were threatened. The war committees also put up posters with slogans such as “Today the writers, tomorrow the professors.”4