The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Despite the internationally acknowledged excellence of the German school system, Nazification met little internal resistance. One of the reasons for this was the strong Nazi support among teachers and student bodies. As many as a third of all teachers are believed to have backed the Nazis when they came to power, far more than other professions. Teachers had long been viewed by the Nazis as a key group in society, and already in 1929 they had formed an alternative association: the Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund (National Socialist Teachers League, NSLB), the purpose of which was to prod the teaching body in the appropriate ideological direction. After 1933, the NSLB was the only association of teachers in the Third Reich.

  The NSLB became an important tool in the top-to-bottom process that would follow, in the transformation of the philosophical and pedagogical fundamentals of the school system, as well as its values. Schoolbooks were rewritten, subjects were switched, and, above all, brains were indoctrinated.

  Just as in the army, teachers were made to swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer. The NSLB, appropriately enough led by a former free corps soldier, Hans Schemm, set up Schulungslager, indoctrination camps where teachers were sent for “retraining.” By 1937 there were more than forty such camps. According to one British observer, the most important ideological source materials used there were Mein Kampf and writings by Alfred Rosenberg. New subjects were introduced into the school curriculum, such as “racial hygiene.” The goal, as Rosenberg put it, was that Nazi ideology should permeate every aspect of the curriculum from history to mathematics.

  The teachers effectively became “Führers” in their own classrooms, and many actually chose to go to school in their party uniforms. Under the Nazis, the classroom became a microcosm of the totalitarian state. There was always a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and the school day began and ended with the Hitler salute—in certain cases also the beginning of each lesson. Education in the Third Reich would not only be defined by a school system where the teachers kept their students under surveillance, but also where the students scrutinized their teachers. Teachers expressing “un-German” opinions could be reported by their students to the Hitlerjugend or the Gestapo.

  Over the course of the 1930s, while Alfred Rosenberg did not personally lead the reformation of the research and education establishment, he certainly hovered over the entire process like an ideological spirit. Rosenberg had a handbook written, Ideological Theses, which briefly described the main foundations of the National Socialist view of the world. The book was intended to form a basic manual for the entire German school system. Education minister Bernhard Rust ensured that every school library in the country had a copy of The Myth of the Twentieth Century.28 The Nazification of the existing school system was never completed in the period of the Third Reich, but one should look at the reforms as embryonic of the totalitarian utopia envisaged by Nazis such as Rosenberg. The new human could only fully come forth among those who were wholly untainted by yesterday’s degeneration: in other words, the children.

  To form the generation that would lead the Third Reich into the future, the traditional school system was not enough. In order to create a fundamentally new human being, a new kind of school would be required. For this reason, in the 1930s the foundations were laid down for a number of elite schools: NS-Ordensburg and the Adolf Hitler schools. The first Adolf Hitler school was inaugurated on April 20, 1937, on the Führer’s birthday. To be accepted by the schools the pupils had to show leadership qualities as well as submit to rigorous racial and medical examination. The teachers of the twelve existing Adolf Hitler schools were usually drawn from the SS, the SA, the Gestapo, or other areas of the Nazi terror machine.

  The young boys who underwent this education were later prepared for entry to one of the four Ordensburg schools, which admitted party acolytes between twenty-five and thirty years old; the chosen students were subjected to hard ideological and military training. The training included regular trials of the students’ courage, with activities such as parachute jumps, but there were also internships in the machinery of the party. Just as in the SS, a mixture of ruthlessness and intellect was encouraged. “To us, the battle of Leuthen is as much a test of character as Faust or Beethoven’s Eroica,” Alfred Rosenberg proclaimed.29

  The third and final stage after Adolf Hitler school and Ordensburg would be the Alfred Rosenberg Hohe Schule der NSDAP.30 The idea was that these young graduates would form the future leadership of the Third Reich. Their schooling would forge them into an ideological “fraternity”—or a Nazi order of knights, if one should wish to put it like that. It was considered necessary to create a “ruling class,” and this was how the ideology would be preserved and safeguarded for the Thousand-Year Reich. At the same time these schools were a way of controlling the legacy of the existing leadership.

  As some Nazis pointed out, there was a clear problem whenever one attempted to fuse physical and intellectual abilities—after all, the latter so often got the upper hand. Few in the contemporary ruling class were prime physical specimens—Himmler’s chin was hardly equal to those displayed by his SS staff. The leadership’s racial purity was highly dubious, and often a well-kept secret. When all was said and done, the Nazi elite was a fairly sickly bunch. Göring was corpulent and a morphine user. Goebbels had a clubfoot, and Hitler suffered from chronic stomach complaints and probably, toward the end of his life, Parkinson’s disease. The Nazi leadership was less “a brotherhood bound by common oaths” than a pack of wolves ready to launch into one another whenever the chance presented itself. Adolf Hitler had created a Darwinist leadership culture that actually worked surprisingly well in a totalitarian system like the Third Reich, a system where a mixture of cunning, scheming, terror, flattery, disloyalty, bureaucratic skill, and ruthlessness was what took one to the top, as opposed to muscle power or purity of blood. Lost in their Aryan utopia of the new human being, they were incapable of seeing that the way to power in Nazi Germany was anything but heroic.

  • • •

  Rosenberg’s greatest hour did not present itself until the end of the 1930s. In the early years, Amt Rosenberg was an organization only in name, with a modest office near Tiergarten and a small number of employees. But slowly and successively, Rosenberg managed to take over more and more areas of responsibility. As the head of ideology he had the possibility of interfering in a whole range of departments. Wherever he saw operations slipping up in their observance of ideological discipline, he was there with his pointer. The fact that he was still the editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, which he was more than willing to exploit in his ideological battles, made it difficult for other Nazi leaders to entirely ignore this pretentious Baltic German.

  Amt Rosenberg functioned as a think tank, conducting ideological surveillance, lobbying, and research. There were departments for ecclesiastical issues, the visual arts, music, education, theater, literature, ancient history, Jews, and Freemasons. A special department started in 1934 for scientific questions was overseen by Alfred Baeumler, who set out the foundations of an entirely new sort of scientist. “Science is not a product of superficial intellect, but rather a creation that has arisen in the depths of the heroic intellect,” said Alfred Baeumler in one of his lectures.31 According to Baeumler, both logic and reason had played out their roles in science, which could only now be driven onward by this heroic intellect. In fact, it was the same old “heroism” that had chimed with Alfred Rosenberg and the free corps writers.

  Heroic science was political in its innermost being, which Baeumler illustrated by comparing the new scientist with the old. The traditional type, referred to as “the theoretical man,” was characterized by passivity, pure consciousness, and absolute contemplation. The new, “political man,” on the other hand, stood out because of his dynamism, direction, and participation. As Baeumler saw it, the scientist should not limit himself to the objective examination of the world; he should actively seek to form it. What
he was describing here was a new type of scientist, a willing instrument of the regime—absolutely crucial for giving an aura of scientific legitimacy to the plethora of National Socialist myths, lies, and conspiracy theories.32

  Rosenberg’s high school and research project, Hohe Schule der NSDAP, was given Adolf Hitler’s approval in 1937. The embryo for this school had been growing in Amt Rosenberg over a number of years. Plans for a high school were mentioned in the organization’s correspondence in 1935. Just as the education of the leaders of the future could not be left to the traditional school system, the future of science had to be similarly nurtured. Hermann Giesler’s drawing and model of the new school was shown to Adolf Hitler, who personally examined and approved it. It is also Hitler who decided that it should be built on the eastern shore of Chiemsee. Hohe Schule der NSDAP, like all the other Nazi elite schools, was to be under direct party control.

  From a broader perspective, the Hohe Schule would above all serve the purpose that had been Alfred Rosenberg’s life’s work: the creation of philosophical and scientific cornerstones for National Socialism. Rosenberg felt that he had identified the weak point of the movement. Even if the Nazi Party had devoted itself to breeding a new ruling class that would later take over power, this was far from a guaranteed future for the movement. Rosenberg was painfully aware that ultimately it was the Führer Principle, not National Socialism in its own right, that held the Third Reich together. Adolf Hitler would not be able to lead the movement forever, as Rosenberg pointed out in a speech as early as 1934. Therefore, he said, it was “our will that the National Socialist movement should lay down the structures that will preserve this state for hundreds of years ahead.”33

  People evolve, change, and die, but ideas are immortal. In the end, it was only a strong ideological foundation that could guarantee the continuance of the Thousand-Year Reich. The Nazis had to create structures that were ideologically strong enough to survive the passage of time—and above all the death of the Führer. Alfred Rosenberg’s vision was that Hohe Schule der NSDAP, described as “National Socialism’s foremost center for research, education, and teaching,” would function as a cornerstone of this ideological cathedral.

  [ 6 ]

  CONSOLATION FOR THE TRIBULATIONS OF ISRAEL

  Amsterdam

  Wout Visser carefully places a small brown box on the table and opens the lid, then takes out a light brown, leather-bound book with worn edges.

  The cover, decorated in a printed pattern of foliage within a rectangular shape, reveals little about its contents. It looks like a small and not especially rare book from the turn of the last century, something that could fairly easily be found in a secondhand bookshop—apart from the distinguishing feature of an almost half-inch hole near the top left corner of the book. There’s a cavity of a fingertip’s width where the leather has given way. Carefully I open the book; I notice that the hole has not only penetrated the cover but continued through the flyleaf, where it has consumed the name of the author—the Portuguese-Jewish writer Samuel Usque. Holding the book against the light admitted by the high windows, I see that the hole has cut all the way to the last page of the book, the pressure making the paper dented and cracked. The twisted bullet has made a coppery tint; wedged on its side, the slug has remained in this exact position for the last seventy years.

  “This book was stolen along with the rest of the library and brought to Germany by the Nazis. We actually believe the bullet was discharged in Germany,” says Wout Visser, a man in his forties, with suspenders to hold up his trousers and the vague hint of a goatee. He is a librarian and researcher in the special collections section of the Amsterdam University Library, housed in a three-story brick building by the beautiful Singel canal. We are sitting in the reading room of one of the university’s best-known collections, the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, to which “the book with the bullet,” as Visser describes it, belongs.

  The book has taken on an almost mythical status in the Rosenthaliana collection, giving rise to a number of theories as to who really shot at the book. A forensic examination of the bullet has only deepened the mystery, for it was not fired from a German rifle but actually from an English-manufactured submachine gun. It has even been possible to trace where this is likely to have taken place, twelve miles or so north of Frankfurt in the little town of Hungen.

  Only a few hours before my visit to Rosenthaliana I arrived at Amsterdam Centraal station, after a seven-hour train journey from Munich via Frankfurt and Cologne. What struck me on the way here was the ease of crossing the border between Germany and the Netherlands. There are no natural boundaries here, such as the forested and mountainous Ardennes and Alps to the south. By comparison, the Flemish lowlands are as flat as a motorway, a fact of which Hitler and his generals were highly aware. The Netherlands had declared itself neutral when the war broke out in 1939. The country had managed to keep out of the First World War, when the German army chose to pass through Belgium. As the Germans saw it, with hindsight, this had been a serious military and strategic error, because the German army was held up longer than had been expected by a ferocious Belgian defense. Hitler had no intention of repeating the mistake. The Netherlands lay on the Wehrmacht’s route to Paris, and this was what sealed the country’s fate in May 1940, as well as that of Rosenthaliana and many more of Amsterdam’s renowned libraries.

  The city’s libraries upheld a unique culture, formed by the religious, intellectual, and economic freedoms that had been the very hallmarks of the sea-trading city since the Middle Ages. Calvinists, Baptists, Quakers, Huguenots, as well as intellectuals and freethinkers, had found their way to the free city by the river Amstel. Two groups of refugees in particular had put their mark on the city and its libraries: Ashkenazi Jews who had fled pogroms in the East, and Sephardic Jews forced out of the Iberian Peninsula. In the 1500s, Amsterdam was one of the few places in Western Europe where Jews could live in relative freedom, which had resulted in the city being named Jeruzalem van het Westen (Jerusalem of the West).

  Samuel Usque’s Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, the mysterious bullet-damaged book at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam. The bullet is believed to have been fired in Germany, where the plundered library was taken.

  The immigrants were to play an important role in the emergence of Holland as an international power during the 1600s. The city’s commercial life was of especial importance, and the foundation of its power. Amsterdam became the birthplace of an economic revolution. The world’s first multinational company, the Dutch East India Company, came into being here, as well as the beginnings of the world’s first modern stock exchange and one of the world’s first national banks.

  Thanks to these new institutions, the Netherlands in the 1600s was dominant in world trade and especially the spice trade with Asia. The rapid rise of the Sephardic Jews in international trade was facilitated by their already established trading network with the Spanish-speaking Americas, and before long also with Asia. But it was also a consequence of a guild system that barred entry to newcomers. This led to many of the Sephardic Jews devoting themselves to the new economy, which before long proved considerably more profitable.1 Some of the largest fortunes in the city were built up by these immigrants, and as a direct consequence of this, also some of its foremost libraries.

  Amsterdam’s freedoms not only served minorities, they also helped printers. Freedom and trade transformed the Netherlands into Europe’s intellectual center in the 1600s, a hub for the dissemination of new, exciting, and dangerous ideas made possible by the printing press. Freethinkers, writers, philosophers, and religious minorities found their way to the city, where they could publish what in other parts of Europe would have led to excommunication and persecution. From Amsterdam, their works could be printed and then shipped all over the Continent with the help of the world’s largest merchant fleet.

  The Dutch government’s tolerance had less to do with idea
lism than sheer economics. Few were concerned about what was being printed, as long as someone was willing to pay, and the sale of ideas was very good business for the trading empire. And in addition to freethinkers, Amsterdam’s printers also served totalitarian rulers and religious fanatics. Peter the Great of Russia gave one printer in Amsterdam a fifteen-year monopoly on the printing of all Russian literature. Like many other monarchs in Europe, he feared the dangerous printers, and wanted to keep them at a safe distance from Russia. In the 1600s Amsterdam became known as “Europe’s publisher.”2

  Amsterdam also became a center for Jewish literature during the 1600s, when Menasseh ben Israel became the first Jew to establish a Hebrew printing press in the Netherlands, his parents having fled the Inquisition in Portugal. Menasseh was much more than a printer; he was a writer, a rabbi, and a diplomat with an international network of contacts. It was Menasseh who personally convinced Oliver Cromwell to let the Jews return to England in the 1650s—from where they had been expelled at the end of the 1200s. He was also the teacher of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and a friend of Rembrandt van Rijn. Menasseh ben Israel’s press and other presses supplied Jewish minorities all over Europe with cheap books.3