Sebastian Finsterwalder holds up one of the latter, showing me the flyleaf on which the number 15 has been written in pencil. It is a light blue, somewhat tatty biography of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, from 1790. The owner’s ex libris can also be seen inside, with an image of a little pixie sitting on a book. It once belonged to the German-Jewish author and journalist Ernst Feder, who was active in the intellectual circles of the Weimar Republic. After the Nazis assumed power, Feder first fled to Paris and then, after the outbreak of war, to Brazil, where he eventually moved in the circles around Stefan Zweig in Rio de Janeiro. The reason this particular book ended up in the RSHA library probably had more to do with the subject than the owner: Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher. The purpose of the RSHA’s library was to collect books, publications, and archives that could assist the SS and the SD in studying the nation’s enemies in depth: Jews, Bolsheviks, Freemasons, Catholics, Poles, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other minority groups.
Because Bergungsstelle labeled the books with a number, depending on their point of origin, Detlef Bockenkamm and Sebastian Finsterwalder have been able to track down thousands of them. But the library also acquired tens of thousands of books from other sources after the war, and in these cases it has not been possible to trace provenance. Right up to 2002, when Bockenkamm first noted the presence of the plundered books, libraries bought collections without investigating their origins.
Bockenkamm’s and Finsterwalder’s efforts to locate the plundered books in the collection of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek has been a Sisyphean labor both in an administrative sense and in terms of the sheer amount of research required, where a single book can take weeks of detective work. The library obtained collections from many different sources before, during, and after the war—and in all of these there could be plundered books.
Berliner Stadtbibliothek rarely obtained any complete collections but rather the remains of thousands of different libraries. For this reason, the librarians have to laboriously track down books from thousands of individual victims. Even if they manage to establish that a book has been plundered, it is not always possible to ascertain how it came to the library, who plundered it, and who owned it. So far they have found 203 books from the RSHA’s library, but only 127 of these have any sort of mark inside enabling the identification of previous owners.
Furthermore, they are fighting a retroactive battle against their former colleagues, who for decades have been rubbing out, tearing off, or falsifying the provenance of these books—all to make them blend into the collection. However, neither Finsterwalder nor Bockenkamm are giving up easily, and they have managed to identify previous owners by studying fragments of torn-off book labels and comparing their color and size with intact book labels in other books.
In 2010, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek began a systematic investigation into its collection. With their colleagues, Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder have manually examined some 100,000 volumes. According to Bockenkamm’s present estimate, there could be more than a quarter of a million plundered volumes in the library.
The most difficult part of the work is not finding the plundered books but tracking down their owners or descendants. Only about a third of the plundered books found by Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder have any kind of bookplates, signatures, or stamps that make it possible to establish previous owners. It is even more difficult to find surviving victims or their descendants to try to return the books.
At first they tried to trace the owners in every instance. While in certain cases they succeeded, in the end it proved too time-consuming a task. Instead, in 2012, they launched a searchable database into which plundered books could be entered with information and images of signatures and owners’ labels.
“We’re trying to make the descendants come to us instead. The database is searchable on Google, so a lot of people involved in genealogical research find us. It’s working; we are returning books every month,” says Finsterwalder.
The database currently contains fifteen thousand books, and new titles are being added all the time. It will take years before all the books are registered.
Sebastian Finsterwalder shows me a ledger listing about two thousand stolen books cataloged during the war. The books were marked with the letter J, an abbreviation for Judenbücher.
Yet resources are scarce. The project is being supported by the city of Berlin and Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung, a federal organization that finances research into provenance. However, funds are allotted to the project for a few years at a time.
“A couple of years is really just enough to start understanding how to tackle the work. We have to build everything from scratch because there’s no one who knows how to do this. Libraries have rarely had any interest in the provenance of books, only their contents, and book labels or signatures have not been registered,” says Finsterwalder.
He reports that the level of interest in dealing with book plundering, both in local authorities and libraries, is still insignificant, and most libraries and institutions in Germany tend to ignore the question.
“There is neither the political will nor the resources to really do something about this. Of the thousands of libraries we have in Germany only about twenty or so have actively checked their collections. There is no collaboration; all the libraries conduct their own research. People are more interested in art, because it’s so valuable,” says Finsterwalder gloomily.
The books that ended up in Berliner Stadtbibliothek’s collection are, with a few exceptions, not worth very much in a financial sense. They are normal books once owned by normal people: novels, children’s books, songbooks—books that can be bought in a secondhand bookshop for a few euros. But they often have great personal value when they are returned to people.
Between 2009 and 2014 in the region of 500 books were returned, a mere drop in the ocean when one considers that there may be 250,000 plundered books in the library.
“We really want to give these books back. But there are only a few of us working with this. As things stand, we have found fifteen thousand volumes with a ‘suspicious’ background, and three thousand that have definitely been plundered. It would take us decades to find every descendant, if there even are any,” says Bockenkamm, while he puts some unusually beautiful bookplates on his desk. Quite clearly, he has a deep attachment to these plates. He knows each one of them. It was through these images that he first started revealing the library’s past. He shows me an ex libris depicting an angel fighting two snakes with a pair of javelins. Another shows a lion walking upright, with its tongue out, and a third is of a woman armed with a goose quill, mounted on a winged horse. Most of these marks are further decorated with the Star of David and have Jewish names on them, such as Hirsch, Bachenheimer, and Meyer. They are highly personal works of art, many illustrative of events in their owners’ lives, often also their relationship to reading, culture, and literature. But they are also full of symbolism from a lost world, and from lost lives—no one can interpret their meaning anymore. It is a world of books and readers that was crushed and dispersed.
“Even worse, it’s impossible to finish this work. It’s impossible! But we have to do what we can,” he says.
Many of the plundered books have no identifiable owners’ marks. What will happen to these books is something Bockenkamm and Finsterwalder do not know. Maybe one day they will be possible to identify, but the likelihood of it is small.
“These books are like ghosts in the library. We know they are stolen, but from whom?” says Finsterwalder, with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.
Although it has only been possible to return a small part of the total, Bockenkamm feels that every individual volume returned is a meaningful act. In a couple of instances, they have managed to return books to actual Holocaust survivors. One of them was Walter Lachman, a German-Jewish Berliner who was only a teenager when he was deported with his gran
dmother in 1942 to a concentration camp in Latvia. His grandmother was murdered, while Lachman was moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was held at the same time as Anne Frank. Frank died, probably of typhoid, just one month before the camp was liberated by British forces in April 1945. Lachman managed to survive even though he was also seriously ill with typhoid fever. After the war he emigrated to the United States.4 Sixty-seven years later he was called up by a friend who had read an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel about the plundered books at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek. One of the books the magazine had chosen to quote from was one of Lachman’s childhood books—a book of fairy tales for Jewish children, which had been given to him by his teacher.5
“He couldn’t go himself. But his daughter came all the way from California to pick up the book. He had nothing left of his childhood apart from a couple of photographs and a hat he wore in the concentration camp. According to his daughter, her father had never really spoken about the past, but this changed once he got the book back. It brought him out of himself and he started telling his story. Now he is giving talks in schools, to children,” says Sebastian Finsterwalder, who feels that this is just one example of why this work is so important.
“These books are keepers of memories. They are not worth much in a financial sense, but they can be priceless to the people and the families who once owned and then lost them. In some cases, when we handed them back it was the first time that children or grandchildren were confronted with their parents or grandparents’ stories. It’s a very emotive process,” Finsterwalder continues.
“When I started looking into the history of these books and went onto the Internet to search for the names I found written inside them, the search results kept indicating Auschwitz. Every time the trail led to Auschwitz. We can’t give people their lives back, but maybe we can give them something else. A book, and maybe a memory,” says Detlef Bockenkamm as he looks down at the bookplates spread across his desk.
• • •
I look up at the dark blue Ishtar Gate from Babylon, reaching up to the ceiling. But I don’t have time to admire the golden oxen, because the elderly brown-haired woman who is leading the way quickly passes through. She has seen it many times. A few hundred yards from the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek lie the offices of the Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung, housed in one of the wings of the Pergamon Museum—a federal authority charged with helping and financing museums, libraries, archives, and other institutions in their efforts to look into provenance issues from the Nazi era.
I am brought to Uwe Hartmann, an art historian and the head of the office. Hartmann is a tall, middle-aged man with an angular face, short-cropped gray hair, and half-rimmed glasses. He started working on provenance questions relating to plundered art during the 1990s, and he has headed the federal authority since it was set up in 2008. In 2013 he was also put in charge of the team whose task was to identify plundered works in the notorious art collection of some fourteen hundred works that had recently been found in Munich with Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer who had worked for the Nazis.
Hartmann has rolled up his sleeves. It is stuffy in the office despite several windows being wide open. Arbeitsstelle für Provenienzforschung has helped finance the work in progress in the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek.
“We have known for some time that we had these books in our collections. We have been able to see for ourselves the stamps, the signatures, and the ex libris. There has been talk of ‘guilt in the cellars.’ But nothing was done about it,” says Hartmann.
Zentral- und Landesbibliothek is far from an isolated case; it was not even one of the libraries that took an active part in the plundering that went on in Germany. The library received neither the most nor the most valuable books in the Third Reich. Certain other libraries, particularly those with a more academic outlook, were prioritized by the Nazis to a far greater extent. Unlike public libraries like Berliner Stadtbibliothek, university and research libraries that were closed to the general public could also take in plundered “forbidden” literature.
One such library that played a very active part in the plundering was the reputable Preussische Staatsbibliothek, now known as Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Germany’s largest library, with a lineage going back to the 1600s. Its collections include the original manuscript of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, the lion’s share of Johann Sebastian Bach’s notes, and the world’s oldest illuminated biblical text, from AD 400. In the war years, Preussische Staatsbibliothek was able to get its hands on considerably more valuable books than the Berliner Stadtbibliothek. The history of the library was brought to light when a student, Karsten Sydow, in his master’s thesis of 2006, revealed that there could be in the region of 20,000 stolen books in the historical collection.6 After conducting its own research, the library has been able to verify that some 5,500 books have, beyond any doubt, been plundered.7 More books would certainly have been found, had it not been for the fact that the Red Army, in turn, plundered the library. Two million books in the library’s collection are estimated to have been taken to the Soviet Union, including most of the Jewish and Hebraic books and manuscripts.8
Preussische Staatsbibliothek also played an important role as a distribution channel for plundered books in the Third Reich. There was an obvious distribution policy for the thousands of libraries and archives that were plundered in Germany and the occupied territories. The most important collections, which were considered significant for the ideological work, were shared between Heinrich Himmler’s RSHA and Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR. These two organizations were often direct rivals when it came to the most valuable collections.
In addition to these, there was a series of other Nazi organizations, institutes, and government departments, all of which competed to get their hands on plundered books and build up their own libraries. Tiered behind them were the nation’s libraries, universities, and other institutions.
After the Nazis seized power, the Preussische Staatsbibliothek was assigned with distributing books that had been stolen from German Jews, Socialists, Communists, and Freemasons. Later in the war, the library continued doing the same with books that had been taken in France, Poland, the Soviet Union, and other occupied areas.
Preussische Staatsbibliothek distributed books to over thirty German university libraries.9 But German libraries also acquired books in other ways. Often, regional libraries were given a piece of the cake when the Gestapo and local party chapters raided forbidden organizations. Books were donated to local town libraries as “a gift from the Party.” It was not unusual for local librarians to be well aware of the better collections in their area, which were worth getting their hands on. However, books were also purchased, as in the case of the Berliner Stadtbibliothek, from the city’s pawnbroker or at “Jewish auctions,” where fleeing Jews had no choice but to sell their belongings for a fraction of their true value.
“The extent to which books were moved around in this way is difficult to estimate, because the books have been dispersed and integrated into so many different German collections. For instance, in the 1960s the GDR [German Democratic Republic] sold large numbers of books to West Germany for economic reasons, in order to get hold of D-marks. These were then handed out to newly formed universities in the West. Today in these collections it is possible to find many books that were stolen from Jews, Communists, and Freemasons,” explains Uwe Hartmann.
“Several of the large libraries in Germany have begun to examine their collections to a certain degree. But we have eight thousand smaller libraries and only one of these has applied for funding from us to examine its inventory. There is an enormous amount of work ahead of us.”
Most German libraries have not so far shown either the interest or the will to start looking for plundered books in their collections. When an expert on stolen property sent out forms to six hundred libraries, only 10 percent chose to reply.10 Quite apart fr
om a general reluctance to confront the issue, there is also the problem of limited resources that tends to put a stop to any progress. Nor is there in Germany any law that obliges institutions to go through their collections, although it has been proposed that one should be drafted. The work is voluntary.
Initially, Hartmann’s institution had an annual budget of one million euros to distribute, which was increased to two million euros in 2012. This money, however, has to be shared among all cultural institutes, and most of the money goes to museums. Up to 2013, the institution had financed 129 projects, of which 90 were museums and only 26 were libraries. Nor does the institution offer full financing but rather offers to share the costs, which results in many smaller libraries taking the position that they cannot afford to get involved.
“Unfortunately the media interest is much greater for plundered art than for books. A recovered masterpiece, perhaps with a value of millions, generates newspaper headlines, whereas a single book could not ever hope to do so, even in highly emotive and moving cases.”
Uwe Hartmann points to another problem with books.
“Art often has a provenance. Old works can be found in exhibition catalogs, auction registers, or they are referred to by art critics. They can be traced. The same can rarely be said for books. If there aren’t any stamps in them, it becomes difficult. Books are rarely unique, after all. An enormous amount of work is required.”
The Book Thieves Page 4