The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The library or, more correctly, the libraries of the RSHA’s Section VII were a very tangible manifestation of the SS and Himmler’s extensive totalitarian ambitions. The research in progress at the RSHA was not only about improving their awareness of their enemies in order to be able to overcome them more effectively—but also the injection of knowledge into the SS’s ideological and intellectual development. The SS was waging war against what it regarded as Jewish intellectualism, modernism, humanism, democracy, the Enlightenment, Christian values, and cosmopolitanism. But this war was not only fought by means of arrests, executions, and concentration camps. It is certainly no coincidence that Heinrich Himmler saw his organization as a National Socialist equivalent to the Jesuit order, which, after the spread of Protestantism in the 1500s, functioned as the spearhead of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. According to Himmler’s view of the world, the SS would in the same way form a bastion against the enemies of Nazi ideology. The danger of taking a one-sided perspective on the Nazis’ relationship to knowledge is that it risks obscuring something even more dangerous: The desire of totalitarian ideology to rule not only over people but also their thoughts. There is a tendency to view the Nazis as unhinged destroyers of knowledge. It is also true that many libraries and archives were lost while under the control of the regime, either through systematic destruction or indirectly as a consequence of war. Despite this, a question that needs to be asked in the shadow of Himmler’s library is the following: What is more frightening, a totalitarian regime’s destruction of knowledge or its hankering for it?

  [ 5 ]

  A WARRIOR AGAINST JERUSALEM

  Chiemsee

  The holy hour for Germans will be at hand when the symbol of their reawakening—the flag with the swastika—has become the only true confession of faith in the Reich.

  —Alfred Rosenberg

  With a soft, swaying shudder the ferry leaves its berth in the harbor below the village of Prien. I have taken a seat at the far end of the stern, on the sundeck, so I can get a good view. The deck has quickly filled with retirees in neon-colored clothes and school-age adolescents sitting on top of each other, vying to get a place in the sun. Hundreds of small white dinghies on the lake are doing their best to catch the faint breeze. I have traveled southeast on the train from Munich for an hour, to where the agricultural landscape begins to be replaced by rolling foothills and then gradually by valleys and mountains—the Bavarian heartland, with its half-timbered houses, green hills, and snowcapped Alps. Halfway between Munich and Berchtesgaden, where Adolf Hitler had his mountain retreat, Berghof, lies Lake Chiemsee. A large, clear blue lake fed by meltwater from the Alps, it is sometimes known as the Bavarian Sea. Stephan Kellner from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek pointed out on my map the place I have come to visit, a place on the opposite side of Chiemsee.

  We have not yet left the bay surrounding Prien, but the view is already striking. At the south end of the lake lies that part of the Alps known as the Chiemgauer Alpen, whose peaks reach more than a mile into the sky. Beyond them lies Austria. After a short crossing the ferry docks at Herreninsel, the largest island in Chiemsee. The retirees and students disembark and walk ashore on a long, skeletal jetty to make their way to the island’s noteworthy spot, Herrenchiemsee.

  The palace was erected at the end of the 1800s by the psychologically unstable King Ludvig II of Bavaria as a more or less identical copy of Louis XIV’s Versailles, though of lesser dimensions. Ludvig II died before the palace was completed, and the work was immediately abandoned because of the fantastical sums the king had already spent on it. For my own part, I have come to see another lunatic’s project by the Chiemsee, which also never came to fruition—a building of which not a single stone was ever laid. This is probably the reason for my remaining on the ferry on my own while the disembarking elderly ladies, slowly but filled with anticipation, wander off toward Herrenchiemsee, immersed in their guidebooks’ descriptions of the Hall of Mirrors and the world’s largest chandelier in Meissen porcelain.

  After the ferry has rounded Herreninsel, the vista opens up, and I can see across to the lake’s far shore. At the same time, I also have a view of the site of this invisible monument, between the village of Chieming in the south and Seebruck by the north shore of the lake, where a promontory juts out. The spot for Alfred Rosenberg’s university project, Hohe Schule der NSDAP, was carefully chosen. The motorway undulates along Chiemsee’s southern shore and the Chiemgau foothills, a connection of the eastern and western regions of south Germany. Construction of the road was begun in 1934 as a part of the extensive motorway system, the Reichsautobahn, that would connect all of Germany by asphalt.

  After the annexation of Austria in 1938, the motorway began to be extended to Vienna, as a way of binding together the sister kingdom. For all who traveled south on this road, the building would have been visible as soon as the Chiemsee came into view. Despite the university never having been built, it is still possible to envisage how it would have looked to a contemporary. The architect’s drawings and photographs of the model are preserved in the Library of Congress in Washington.1 Rosenberg commissioned Hermann Giesler—along with Albert Speer, Nazi Germany’s most renowned architect—to design the building. The drawings and models indicate that it would have been a monumental complex, with several interconnected buildings. What immediately stands out is the entrance to the main building, where a tower almost like a high-rise block rises four times higher than the wings. The uppermost part of the tower is formed as a classical temple. It is an example of the dominant architectural style of the Third Reich, a new classicism conveyed in monumental, almost brutal proportions. The buildings were intended to impress and intimidate the observer into submission.

  “Hohe Schule shall one day be a center for National Socialist and ideological research and thinking,” Adolf Hitler declared.2

  Although the building was never constructed, another aspect of the Hohe Schule project was certainly implemented. After all, the school on the eastern shore of Chiemsee was merely the architectural manifestation, the physical shell of an ideological research project that had been set in motion long before.

  Alfred Rosenberg would turn out to be Heinrich Himmler’s foremost competitor in terms of ideological production, research, and education. The two men slugged it out in an intense battle for Europe’s libraries and archives. Their two respective organizations ran extensive plundering operations during the war, with special commando units and local offices established from the Atlantic coast in the west to Volgograd in the east, from Spitzbergen in the north to Greece and Italy in the south. Just as the activities in RSHA’s Section VII were influenced by the disposition of their chief and his view of the world, the various research and library projects under the auspices of Rosenberg’s organization, Amt Rosenberg, would also prove to be a reflection of his. Himmler and Rosenberg competed to be the primary ideological fountainheads of the movement, but their ideas and outlook were different to a certain degree. While Himmler was drawn to mythological and even occult-inspired ideas, Rosenberg had a fanatical obsession with what he regarded as the Jewish global conspiracy. When it came to ideological production, Rosenberg’s ambitions were comparatively more serious and ambitious.

  Hohe Schule was a grandiose attempt to lay down the foundations of an entirely new kind of science and a new sort of scientist. The National Socialist view of science would encompass and permeate all the disciplines—and be constructed on the understanding that there was a unique and race-specific “German science.”

  But possibly Alfred Rosenberg’s most important project was his attempt to give National Socialist ideology a philosophical framework that might lend the movement a certain amount of recognition both in Germany and internationally.3 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they did not possess a movement with a fully evolved ideological approach; the National Socialist movement included a diverse collection of varying and often contradictory o
pinions and groups, from conservative nationalists to fanatical race ideologists. There were veins of socialism and, in the Nazi union movement, syndicalist tendencies. The party leadership included both regressive nostalgics and others with a comparatively modern outlook on the world that, to a certain extent, also included an acceptance of artistic modernism.

  On their way to power, the Nazi Party had absorbed a series of other far-right movements and organizations. Large numbers of its membership had earlier been members of other radical right-wing parties, only to abandon these when the NSDAP became the dominant force. Different forces and groups within the movement were constantly trying to pull the party in various political directions. Apart from a few hardened positions, National Socialism was undeveloped and therefore malleable. Throughout the period of the Third Reich there were political differences in the party, but these grew less significant with the passage of time, and the overall tolerance for diversity diminished. The immutable core that held together this untidy political movement was basically Adolf Hitler himself and the principle of leadership that had taken form with the Führer. It was the so-called Führer Principle—blind and absolute obedience to the leader—that was the most important pillar of the ideology.

  The principle in question was based on a conception of Germans, without a charismatic leader, as merely an ungovernable and shapeless mass; only once they were firmly subordinated to the Führer were they transformed into a unified people with a goal and a direction to get there. According to this idea, the leader gained his legitimacy as the embodiment of the inner will of the people, their spirit and their soul. Democracy, on the other hand, was guided by popular will and was nothing but a corrupt rule of the mob, like a herd of sheep without a shepherd.

  Without the leadership principle the movement would have been fragmented by internal rifts and, most likely, would never even have united in the first place. Factions, organizations, and leaders within the party were constantly fighting, the conflicts ranging from questions of how to define a Jew to discussions on German expressionism. In the final analysis it was usually Adolf Hitler, not a clear-cut ideology, who settled the disputes.

  As the central figure of the leadership cult, Hitler was turned into an ideological prophet, yet he was by no means always clear in his views. Often he preferred to keep out of ideological battles and even encouraged a measure of controlled rivalry in the movement as a way of playing off the factions against each other.

  After coming to power in 1933, the party had to convert its political visions into practical politics. Another challenge was the enormous inflow of new members to the party, the widespread fear being that the political machine would be flooded with opportunists and infiltrators. There was an almost paranoiac conception that such people would dilute “the true vision.” Ideological untidiness was therefore viewed in the early 1930s as a growing problem. Robert Ley, the Reichsorganisationsleiter—head of the national organization of the Nazi Party—had already turned to Alfred Rosenberg, complaining about the “serious fragmentation in the movement relating to how the world should be seen.”4 Adolf Hitler also recognized the problem of ideological “fragmentation.” How could the party cement its position of power and handle an inflow of members counted in the hundreds of thousands, without losing its ideological soul? For this reason, in 1934 he put Alfred Rosenberg in charge of the party’s spiritual and ideological development and education. Rosenberg’s official title was Beauftragter des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP, or the Führer’s Representative for All Spiritual and Ideological Research in the NSDAP. An organization was set up in the same year in Berlin, by the name of Dienststelle Rosenberg (Section Rosenberg); however, Amt Rosenberg would later be used as an umbrella name for the various projects, titles, and organizations of Alfred Rosenberg for the party.

  What had most of all consolidated Rosenberg’s position as the chief ideologue was his philosophical work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930. He had also gathered around him a network of researchers, ideologues, race experts, and philosophers, often far more gifted than he was—their purpose to help build up, establish, and safeguard the ideological legacy of National Socialism.

  Rosenberg’s position as an ideologue was based on his status as one of the movement’s “old warhorses” that had survived, both literally and in a political sense. Rosenberg’s survival was partly due to his loyalty to Hitler, but also to the fact that he never posed any real threat to the latter’s standing in the party. Rosenberg was not engaged in realpolitik, he was actually more of a fanatical idealist: “It was Rosenberg’s tragedy that he really believed in National Socialism,” wrote the German historian Joachim Fest.5

  • • •

  In February 1917, Alfred Rosenberg, then twenty-four years old, was living in an apartment block about an hour outside Moscow. A few years earlier he had begun studying architecture at the Technical University in Reval, now known as Tallinn. When in 1915 the Russian front had started threatening Estonia, the university with its students and teachers had quickly been evacuated to the interior of the Russian imperial nation. In 1917 Alfred Rosenberg was getting close to graduating, and he spent his days reading Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, and Indian philosophy. The serious and introspective scholar seems to have been utterly unaware of the social tensions in imperial Russia, and the violent revolutionary wave that was about to break over the country. “At the end of February came news about strikes and bread riots, and then one day it happened—the revolution.”6

  At first, Rosenberg was enthused by the atmosphere; he even went into Moscow and joined the hundreds of thousands of people that thronged the streets in a general state of “hysterical joy.” He describes in his memoirs his sense of relief at the “corrupt” tsarist regime having fallen at last. But once the joyful celebrations were replaced by anarchy, disintegration, and Bolsheviks, his feelings began to be replaced by something else.7 One day in the summer of 1917, the year of the revolution, while he was sitting in his room studying, an unknown man came in and put a book on his table. Written in Russian, which Rosenberg spoke fluently, the book proved to be the proceedings of a secret Jewish conference allegedly held in 1897: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For Rosenberg, this document was to have pivotal importance. As far as he was concerned, it showed the real background to the fall of the tsar. The revolution was not instigated by German workers and the peasants rising up against the oppressive tsar, but was in fact part of a global conspiracy that had been planned by the Jews.

  In the 1800s there had been waves of pogroms directed at the large Jewish population of imperial Russia. The tsarist regime had publicly condemned the attacks on Jews, while secretly both supporting and encouraging them, as a desperate political measure of using anti-Semitism to unify a multicultural and ethnically diverse empire on the verge of breaking up. By directing the hatred against the Jews, there was the hope that the real problems could be hidden. The instigators of the pogroms tended to be anti-Semitic, nationalist groups that regarded Jews as “revolutionary” elements.

  The Russian extreme right began at an early stage to exploit “Jewish revolutionaries” in its propaganda, and this left a highly influential legacy for National Socialism. By the turn of the century, the notorious tsarist secret service, Okhrana, had produced a document that was widely distributed in Germany between the wars, the very same document that ended up in young Rosenberg’s hands in 1917. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to show the minutes of a secret conference held at the end of the 1800s, in which a group of influential Jews, known as the Elders of Zion, swore an oath to take command of the world. By infiltration and corruption, the Jews would enlist the help of others, including capitalists, liberals, Freemasons, and Communists, to control the world while remaining out of sight.

  For Rosenberg, reading the document was a decisive moment in his life. He was himself a part of the ruling minority t
hat perceived itself as threatened by the revolution. He had grown up in Reval and was a Baltic German, the German minority that had dominated this region since the Middle Ages through the Teutonic order of knights and the Hanseatic League. The cities were controlled by a German bourgeoisie, while the countryside was dominated by German landed gentry, which had for many years controlled a largely feudal class of Baltic and Slavic peasants. The Baltic Germans regarded themselves as custodians of a higher culture than that of their neighbors. As so often happens with émigré communities, the image of the home country was both cherished and romanticized, a concept known as Heimat. For Alfred Rosenberg, Germany was a dream, a fantasy, a society of idealized people steeped in the spirit of Schiller and Goethe. Weimar classicism was at the very core of Baltic German identity.

  Rosenberg’s growing up in multi-ethnic tsarist Russia would play a decisive role in his subsequent thinking. The concept of the superiority of Aryans, the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, and the given right of Germans to expand eastward were all products of his background. Later, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, he would argue that Russia had everything to thank its Aryan invaders for: Vikings, the Hanseatic League, and Baltic Germans. Without their presence in history, Russia would have fragmented into chaos and anarchy just as it did after the revolution of 1917.8

  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would confirm the ideas and misconceptions with which the young Baltic German was already encumbered. As a devoted adherent of high Germanic culture, he had already read one of the most influential works of that time—which he would later even attempt to transcribe into a National Socialist version—Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century).