The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The number of plundered books hiding in German libraries today cannot be estimated by anyone.

  “It’s a very difficult question to answer. Thousands of German libraries have not even gone through their collections as yet. It’s a case of millions of books that have to be manually checked.”

  It is also not easy to determine how many libraries were plundered. Thousands of the libraries that were sacked were never reestablished and their books never returned. There is also a lack of registers or catalogs that can tell us how extensive these collections were, or what they held. For instance, before the Nazis seized power in Germany there were thousands of “people’s libraries” in the country, set up by labor unions, Socialist organizations, and the German Social Democrats. In all, there were more than one million books in these libraries. Most were never returned.

  Millions of books were plundered from German Masonic orders, who were forced to disband after the Nazis took power. By 1936, the SS had built up a collection of 500,000 to 600,000 books from German Masonic orders alone.11 These were destined to end up in the national security council’s library, when the various security organs in the country were gathered under the executive control of the RSHA at the end of the 1930s.

  Yet even this plunder was on a modest scale when compared with the ravages of the Nazis in Europe as a whole. In France alone, ERR confiscated the collections of 723 libraries, containing over 1.7 million books. Of these, tens of thousands were antique and medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and other valuable books and writings.12

  In Poland, probably the country that was hit hardest, it is estimated that 90 percent of the collections belonging to schools and public libraries were lost. In addition, 80 percent of the country’s private and specialized libraries disappeared. More or less the entire collection of the Polish national library, consisting of some 700,000 volumes, was scattered. According to one estimate, 15 million of Poland’s 22.5 million books were lost, but it is unclear what proportion of these were plundered, lost, or destroyed during the war.

  The extent of the plunder in the Soviet Union is more difficult to quantify. According to most available calculations the losses are almost astronomical. According to one suggestion from UNESCO, as many as 100 million books may have been destroyed or looted in what was then the Soviet Union.13

  Far from all the plundered books ended up in German collections after the war. Most of the enormous book collections that the Nazis collected through plundering were themselves subject to plunder, dispersal, and disappearance. Above all the victorious powers helped themselves. The Library of Congress in Washington sent over a special delegation to Germany that shipped home more than one million books.14 The Red Army ended up confiscating more than ten million books. No one knows how many books were destroyed by bombing raids. The centrally located city libraries were easily combustible victims of Allied fire-bomb raids. In total, Germany is believed to have lost between a third and a half of all of its book collections, as a consequence of fires, bombing, and plunder.

  Yet, in spite of all these losses, large numbers of plundered books remained in German libraries. Many, as in the case of Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, plugged the gaps in their collections with books from various Nazi organizations. The German historian Götz Aly estimated in 2008 that there were at least one million plundered books in Germany libraries.15 It was a conservative estimate, and probably the actual figure is much higher. Just as in the case of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, the numbers tend to swell once a library starts purposefully going through its collections. When I ask Uwe Hartmann how long it will take to go through the German book collections, he answers with a smile.

  “When I lecture before students, I usually tell them that this is something that will be ongoing throughout their lives. It will go on for many, many decades ahead. The next generation that takes over at libraries and in museums will also have no choice but to deal with this. These objects bear a history that we cannot ignore.”

  [ 3 ]

  GOETHE’S OAK

  Weimar

  The monster was forced onto its knees in agony. Die, you beast, you symbol of the German Reich. And Goethe? To us, Goethe did not exist anymore, Himmler had exterminated him.

  — Diary of Prisoner 4935

  A thick fog envelops the lush woodland like an opaque membrane. It is difficult to see more than ten yards ahead. I follow the cracked asphalt. At the blurred edges of the fog I see others, carefully advancing. Their voices whisper. Then I can make out the gates of the camp, with their brown wooden tower, reminiscent of an old village church. The iron gates are emblazoned with the words Jedem das Seine, a German version of the Latin motto Suum cuique, which, in English derivation, means more or less “to each his own.” It is an idiomatic expression with deep roots in German culture, appearing in the writings of Martin Luther and other German Reformation thinkers. It is also the title of a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, first performed in 1715 only some four miles from the spot where I am standing, in the culturally significant German city of Weimar. The expression can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but on the gates of the concentration camp of Buchenwald there can be little doubt about the message it conveys: All shall get what they deserve. I have traveled a few hours south of Berlin to the green German heartland of Thüringen. Just inside the gates lies the crematorium, a gray concrete building dominated by a roughly constructed brick chimney. Here many of the tens of thousands of people who died were incinerated.

  Buchenwald, one of Germany’s largest concentration camps, is situated on the hill of Ettersberg, in the middle of a lovely deciduous forest known for its beech trees and ancient oaks. Elie Wiesel, the author and Nobel Prize winner, who was deported here as a sixteen-year-old, said of the place when he visited it long afterward: “If these trees could talk.”1 According to Wiesel, there was a special irony in the contrast between Ettersberg’s enchanting woodlands and the nightmares that were played out here between 1937 and 1945. Wiesel was not the only future Nobel Prize winner to be kept here as a captive. Another inmate was the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, who has described this period in The Man Without a Destiny. Many other authors, poets, artists, musicians, architects, academics, and intellectuals were here. More than 230,000 prisoners from all over occupied Europe were sent to Buchenwald: the political and intellectual enemies of Nazidom, Jews, homosexuals, Poles, Roma, the mentally ill, the lesser abled, Freemasons, Catholics, criminals, and prisoners of war. Fifty-six thousand of them were murdered. Especially cruel methods of torture and execution were applied by the camp guard and SS-Hauptscharführer, Martin Sommer. He now goes by the name of “the Hangman of Buchenwald,” because, in the woods to the north of the barracks, he used to string up the prisoners in the trees by their hands tied across their backs. This method of torture, known as strappado, had also been used during the Inquisition.

  The weight of the body often leads to the arms being wrenched out of the shoulder sockets. At the same time, it is said, Sommer and his guards walked among the trees, striking the helpless prisoners’ faces, legs, and genitals with wooden cudgels. “The torture drove some of the prisoners to the edge of madness. Many of them asked the SS men to shoot them so they would not have to endure the agony,” the survivor Willy Apel testified.2 The tormented cries and moans that were heard resulted in the place being named “The Singing Forest.”

  One of the trees in the Ettersberg forest would take on a particular significance. I walk from the crematorium and follow rows of gaping concrete foundations—the remains of the prisoners’ barracks. On the left lies the camp block that once housed Allied war prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and army deserters. Almost down by the large brick building, which also included the disinfection unit, I see it between two barracks: a stout gray-green tree stump, its roots still firmly gripping the ground. The inscription on a rough-hewn stone slab reads “Goethe-Eiche” (Goethe’s oak).

&nbs
p; When the woods in Ettersberg were cleared in 1937 to make space for the concentration camp, the SS guards left one of the oaks standing. There was a rumor that Goethe himself used to sit under this thick, mighty oak. It was not the only oak in Thüringen to be associated with the national poet, but this particular oak was destined to be charged with a very particular symbolism of the camp, its guards, and its prisoners. Goethe, who lived most of his life in Weimar, used to make excursions on horseback to Ettersberg, a popular place for romantic day trips in the 1700s. Goethe told his friend and biographer Johann Peter Eckermann that in this wood he felt “great-hearted and free.”

  When Buchenwald was constructed, the SS initially had the intention of naming the camp “K.L. Ettersberg.” This, however, was met with howls of protest from the bourgeoisie of Weimar, because of Ettersberg’s well-established connotations with Goethe and Weimar classicism. It was not considered an appropriate name for a concentration camp. For this reason, Heinrich Himmler decided to give the camp a made-up name: Buchenwald (the beech forest).3

  According to one local tradition, it was at this exact tree that Goethe wrote the Walpurgis Night passage in Faust, when Mephistopheles takes Faust to Brocken Mountain for the witches’ nocturnal Sabbath. Also, according to hearsay, he had sat under this tree while he wrote “The Wanderer’s Night Song,” which he sent in a letter in 1776 to his friend and lover Charlotte von Stein, with a dedication from “the slopes of Ettersberg”:

  Thou that from the heavens art,

  Every pain and sorrow stillest,

  And the doubly wretched heart

  Doubly with refreshment fillest,

  I am weary with contending!

  Why this rapture and unrest?

  Peace descending

  Come ah, come into my breast!

  (Translation by Henry Wadworth Longfellow)

  Maybe the two lovers had even once sat together under the tree? But there was another myth intricately bound to this tree: that this oak in some mystical way was connected to the destiny of Germany. As long as this tree lived, Germany would endure. But if it fell, on the other hand, the German nation would fade.

  In fact, the oak eventually took on two entirely different symbolic realities, one for the SS guards who had decided that the oak had to be preserved, and another for the prisoners of the camp. For the SS, the oak was a link to a great Germanic cultural tradition, of which they felt they were the true inheritors. The SS corps that guarded the camp participated actively in the cultural life of Weimar. At the National Theater, of which Goethe had once been the director, some of the best seats were reserved for the “Death’s Head” Regiment of the SS. The ensemble also made visits to Buchenwald, where it performed for the guards. On one occasion the romantic operetta The Land of Smiles was performed—ironically enough it had been written by one of the inmates of the camp, the Austrian librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda. He was later sent to Auschwitz, where he was beaten to death by a guard.

  For many of the camp prisoners, this oak, in the middle of this infernal world, took on a representation of dreams, fantasies, and hopes that were still keeping them alive. For prisoners who were rooted in German culture, the tree symbolized another, brighter, and more enlightened land than the one that kept them incarcerated. The German author and poet Ernst Wiechert described in his depiction of camp life, Der Totenwald (The Forest of Death), how the tree gave consolation to his alter ego, Johannes:

  Dusk was already falling when Johannes yet again left the gap between the barracks where they spent their hour of leisure in the evenings. It only took him a minute of walking, and then he was standing under the oak, whose shadow was said to have fallen once on Goethe and Charlotte von Stein. It grew in one of the camp lanes, and here was the only spot from where one had an unimpeded view of the land below. The moon had risen now over the tree-covered hills, and the last sounds of the camp ebbed into silence.

  For a while he looked out over the darkening sky, so alone, as if he were the last human on earth, and he tried to recall all the verses he knew from the one who had perhaps stood here a hundred and fifty years ago. None of his greatness had been lost, and even if he had been chained to a galley at the age of fifty, nothing would have been lost. “Noble, helpful, and good . . .” No, not even this had gone under, as long as there was still one human being who repeated it to himself, and tried to preserve it till his last hour had come.4

  For Wiechert, Goethe personified the true German cultural tradition, like a beautifully illuminated path, although the people had lost their way and strayed into darker parts of the forest. Many survivors from the camp described the oak. The French artist and resistance fighter Léon Delarbre often sat under the oak, sketching its network of branches.

  Not everyone shared Wiechert’s perspective. Rather, they viewed the oak as a symbol of the inherent evil of Germanic culture, of oppression and cruelty. These prisoners kept alive the myth of the oak being tied to the fate of Germany. And it gave them hope. The oak in the camp started slowly withering and dying. The leaves failed to rejuvenate after one winter, and the bark fell off until the trunk stood white, dry, and naked. But the tree was still standing, until one day in August 1944, when Allied bombers carried out a raid on the factories adjoining the concentration camp. One of the bombs hit the laundry, which caught fire. Before long the flames had spread to the vulnerable oak tree. A Polish prisoner known to us only by his camp identification number, 4935, described the event as follows:

  I could hear the crackling of the fire and see the sparks flying: the burning branches of the oak fell down and rolled across the tar paper on the roofs. I felt the smell of smoke. The prisoners formed a long human chain, and passed buckets of water from the well to the fire. They saved the laundry but not the oak. In their faces one could see a secret joy emerging, a silent triumph: Now we knew that the prophecy would come true. Before our very eyes, as smoke mixed with fantasy, this was not a tree but a many-armed monster, writhing in the flames. We could see how its arms fell off and the trunk grew smaller as if collapsing unto itself. The monster was forced onto its knees in agony. Die, you beast, you symbol of the German Reich. And Goethe? To us, Goethe did not exist anymore, Himmler had exterminated him.5

  • • •

  In front of the National Theater in Weimar stand Goethe and Schiller, with their eyes fixed on infinity. Goethe’s hand rests on his friend’s shoulder, while Schiller reaches across to accept the laurel garland that Goethe holds out to him. Ernst Rietschel’s statue from 1857 is typical of its time, and would eventually, in the mid-1800s, be used as a model for many other statues erected all over the country of the two literary giants. Statues of Goethe and Schiller were a direct expression of the strong nationalist sentiments whipped up all over Germany, at a time when Weimar became a cult.

  At the edge of the city core lies the Park an der Ilm, a park with little footpaths through wooded areas growing so densely that the paths are turned into green tunnels. One leads to an open meadow, another to a garden folly, one to a fountain gushing out of a boulder, another to a cave or a picturesque ruin. The park is a romantic fantasy. It has not changed very much since the end of the 1700s, when it was established, inspired by English gardens. Overlooking open fields lies the poet’s white garden house, where he lived during his first years in Weimar. By this time Goethe had already achieved fame all over Europe with his debut novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther—whose passionate, overwhelmingly emotional prose gave rise to enormous consternation in a century much occupied with reason, rationality, and Enlightenment thinking. This romantic idea of devotion to beauty, worship of nature, and poetry has become an important aspect of German self-perception. Yet at the same time it seems to hold a dark spot within itself. How could the inheritors of this culture, within a few generations, be hanging, torturing, and murdering people in the very same woods where Goethe once sat writing poetry? The image of it, on the one hand filled with rad
iance, and on the other with darkness, has sometimes been referred to as the “Weimar-Buchenwald dichotomy.” These two aspects form a microcosm of the German dilemma, the Janus face of Germany. The paradox is amply illustrated by the divergent perspectives on Goethe’s oak in Buchenwald.

  Some have wished to see these two sides of German culture as wholly separate, in order not to besmirch the radiance of the classicist’s era. This has been the predominant approach in Weimar for most of the postwar period. Others maintain that this is a historical simplification, even a falsification, for the plain reason that these two sides are interlinked by cultural, philosophical, and literary roots. Not directly related, perhaps, yet National Socialism grew and mercilessly exploited some of these ideas, which sprang from the same root: German nationalism and the rejection of Enlightenment ideals.

  High German romanticism was strongly resistant to the emotional paucity of the Enlightenment era. Of particular importance were the ideas that took form at the university in Jena, about twelve miles east of Weimar, during the first half of the nineteenth century, when thinkers such as Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich von Schelling, as a counterreaction to the Enlightenment, began to formulate the thinking that is known today as German idealism. They left behind a voluminous inheritance of ideas easily mined for inspiration by twentieth-century National Socialists—the most influential of these being the emphasis on Germany’s uniqueness, in the form of spiritual elevation. Of even greater influence was the philosopher and historian Johann Gottfried Herder, one of the great thinkers that Goethe had brought to Weimar, who some have suggested may even have been the poet’s prototype for Faust. Herder’s idea of the unique people’s soul and his strong emphasis on patriotism would prove decisively important in the emergence of German nationalism. Herder’s goal was above all to distance German culture from the strong French influence of that time—European culture in the 1700s had been dominated by France. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, another philosopher often referred to as the father of German nationalism, felt that the German people were possessed of unique characteristics, and that for this reason Germans should “create and lead a new era in human history.”6 Already with Fichte there was a fully articulated anti-Semitism: he took the view that it would damage the German nation if Jews were given equal citizen’s rights—as they had elsewhere across Europe, in a process of political development that had spread since the French Revolution. In France, Jews had been given citizen’s rights, which had been the beginning of the Jewish emancipation in which European Jews increasingly chose to break their isolation in the ghettos and assimilate linguistically and culturally with European society.