“We have a more or less complete collection of the books printed by Menasseh ben Israel in the 1600s. I think there’s just a handful of them missing. But we also have books from a number of Amsterdam’s other Jewish printers. No other library in the world owns a collection like this,” says Visser, gesturing at the bookcases that surround us in the reading room of Rosenthaliana. On the shelves are a representative selection of the collection with a focus on history, religion, and philosophy. But what can be seen here is only a fraction of the library, which comprises some 100,000 books, as well as thousands of Jewish journals, pamphlets, manuscripts, and archive material. The oldest of them are manuscripts about Jewish festivals, religious events, and legends from the 1200s. Among the rarities are the first book ever printed in Istanbul, an incunabulum from 1493: Arbaab Turim by Rabbi Jakob Ben Asher, a work on fourteenth-century Jewish law printed by Sephardic Jews who had been expelled in 1492 and settled in the Ottoman Empire. Prints up to the year 1500 are considered incunabula, because after this time the printing was done with loose letters. Many of these books often only existed in a single copy or at most a few copies. It is believed that in the region of 150 editions of books in Hebrew were printed before 1500, of which 34 can be found at Rosenthaliana. The collection also includes handwritten copies from the 1400s of the Arab philosopher Averroes’s commentary on the scientific writings of Aristotle.4
Despite the collection today being very much slanted to the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, the library originally hails from Germany.
“Its origin is with Leeser Rosenthal in the mid-1800s. He was a Polish-born rabbi working in Hannover for the rich families of the city, which gave him the opportunity of building up his collection at this time. He collected books on the history of the German Jews, religious writings, and the Jewish Enlightenment,” Visser tells me.
The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, was an intellectual movement among Jews that had been inspired by the French Enlightenment. The founding figure was the German Jewish figure Moses Mendelssohn, who attempted a synthesis of Jewish religiosity with the philosophical rationalism of the time. The movement encouraged Jews to break with their cultural isolation and assimilate into European societies by learning new languages and adopting new professions in science and art.
Rosenthal’s collection ended up in the Netherlands after his death in 1868, because his son moved to Amsterdam.
“When Rosenthal died, his family tried to sell the collection, but no one wanted to buy it. It was offered to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, to be housed in the Kaiserliche und Königliche Bibliothek in Berlin. But he declined,” says Visser.
Rosenthal’s collection was considered at this time to be one of the finest Jewish private collections in Germany. The library consisted of six thousand volumes and a collection of manuscripts. In 1880 the family decided that they would donate the collection to Amsterdam’s university. The family also offered to pay for a librarian, which they continued to do until the outbreak of the First World War, when they ruined themselves after some investments in the Hungarian railroad network.
The collection grew quickly after being established in Amsterdam, where it was complemented with literature on the Netherlands’ Jews. By the time of the Second World War the library had multiplied many times over. “Some of Amsterdam’s private Jewish collectors hid their books in Rosenthaliana in the hope that they could be saved there. We think some of their books are still here, but we can’t find them,” says Visser, who a few years ago was asked to track down the missing collections.
The library’s chief librarian, Herman de la Fontaine Verwey, who had good contacts with Amsterdam’s collectors, was responsible for this clandestine storage of books.
“Fontaine Verwey wrote about one case when a collector ‘donated’ his library. If he returned he would have his collection back, otherwise it would accrue to the library. This was just one case. But we have never been able to find these contracts, I believe they were destroyed after the war, when there was an assumption that the owners would never come back.”
Of Amsterdam’s Jewish population of eighty thousand people, only about a fifth survived the Holocaust.
“After the war, Fontaine Verwey was highly secretive about this matter; it was never clarified how many of these books were left in the collection. I have to admit that I have failed in my investigations. He took his secret with him into the grave, and it is now part of the dark history of this library,” says Visser.
Visser opens Rosenthaliana’s ledger from 1940. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May, new books continued to be cataloged for another six months. On November 18, 1940, someone made an entry for Hebrew Education in Palestine by Eliezer Rieger, one of the founders of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The book was bought for 2.65 guldens. It is the last entry, and after it there is nothing but empty lines. No new books were cataloged in the following six years. On that day, the reading room of Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana was closed by the SD. Jews working for the library, the majority of the employees, were immediately fired without notice. One of them was the library’s curator, Louis Hirschel, who wrote dejectedly in a letter to a friend, “This has meant a temporary end to the outstanding history of Rosenthaliana.”5
• • •
A few hundred yards from the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, by the Keizersgracht canal, stands a three-story white stone house. Judging by the black-and-white photographs from the 1930s that I have found, the house has not changed in any significant respect. Today it holds an institute for media and art. Keizersgracht 264 is neither the oldest nor the most beautiful house along the canal, but it is sitting on a most remarkable story.
During the 1930s this house was the epicenter for one of the most important rescue operations in the history of archives and historical research. Paradoxically, within a few years the same house was being used as one of the hubs of the greatest-ever thieving operation of archive materials and books.
In June 1940, just a few weeks after the capitulation of the Netherlands, staff from the SD came to Keizersgracht to seal off the white house. The decision was not made by coincidence. The building was the home of the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG)—the International Institute of Social History. It was founded in 1935 by Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, the country’s first professor of economic history at the Nederlandsche Handelshogeschool. The purpose of the institute was to collect, or rather to save, archive material from left-wing movements such as trade unions and Socialist parties, but also from important private collections.
Today, IISG is situated in Amsterdam’s east harbor, in a modern office building that, from a distance, looks as if it is made of recycled cardboard. At the entrance I meet Huub Sanders, a researcher at the institute. He explains that it was his involvement in the left-wing student movement of the 1970s that first got him involved with the institute. “I got interested in why the Karl Marx Archive was in Amsterdam,” says Sanders with a smile. It’s a question that goes back to the formation of the institute in the 1930s and its passionate founder Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus. “Posthumus was a man who always looked for primary sources in economic and social history. He started collecting materials relating to the field of economics as early as before the First World War.”
It was very much expected that the institute would be the first victim of the Nazis’ plundering operation in Holland. Posthumus had founded the institute as a direct answer to advancing fascism in Europe. A torrent of refugees from the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy had come to Western Europe over the course of the 1930s. With them, they brought valuable documents, archives, and books. Posthumus’s vision was, through the creation of the institute, to establish a safe harbor for archives belonging to the Socialists, trade unions, and workers’ movements that were being mercilessly hunted both by Fascists and Bolsheviks.
“Posthumus was the right person for th
e job. He was himself a Socialist. And he had an international network both in political and academic circles. His motivation was that he wanted to save the historical inheritance of the workers’ movement,” says Sanders while we go into an industrial elevator, which descends into the innards of the ISG. Here, on thousands of feet of dark gray shelving, is the world’s biggest archive of social history: in all, it encompasses four thousand separate archives, from Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the European Trade Union Confederation among others. There are also millions of journals and magazines here. On a shelf, wrapped in brown paper, lie piles of the Swedish journal Arbetaren (The Worker) from 1932.
A unique and valuable part of the great archive is what Posthumus, with a small group of coworkers, managed to acquire in a matter of a few years at the end of the 1930s. Sanders shows me to a shelf covered by a light-excluding blind, which he sweeps aside with a dramatic gesture. The documents are lined up on the shelf behind a sheet of glass.
“This is the manuscript of The Communist Manifesto,” says Sanders, pointing at some bleached papers with tightly written lines of slightly forward-slanted handwriting. Caught off guard, I ask if this is really “the only one.”
“I suppose there can only be one,” says Sanders, laughing.
The papers, covered in emendations and additions, are close to illegible. But I can make out Karl Marx’s signature. Also in evidence are some pages in longhand from Das Kapital, a protocol from the First International in 1864, and documents by Leon Trotsky.
The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archive consists of more than five shelf-yards of materials, notes, manuscripts, and extensive correspondence between the two men. The archive was put together by the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and smuggled out of Nazi Germany along with the party archive in 1933. The German Social Democrats, whose assets had been confiscated in Germany, were in financial need, and had no other choice but to sell the archive. The most eager prospective buyer was the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, in other words Joseph Stalin. Archives that could be traced back to the founder of the ideology were being frenetically collected there.
“They were prepared to pay the most. But thank goodness the party realized it would have been shameful selling it to Stalin. Instead, Posthumus managed to buy it,” says Sanders.
Documents from the First International were acquired from the party, along with the archive of the Social Democrats themselves. Posthumus’s work to save the Socialists’ historical legacy in Europe had been a phenomenal success. From Spain, the archive of the anarcho-syndicalist movement had been taken out of Spain before Catalonia fell to Franco’s troops. A number of Socialist archives had also been saved from the Nazis after the annexation of Austria. The private collections were every bit as impressive—the institute had secured the archives of anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Max Nettlau. Further, important archives from the Russian Revolution had been acquired, belonging to the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Mensheviks.
Posthumus had also opened branches of the institute in Paris and Oxford. The Paris office had been given an important collection of Leon Trotsky’s papers, donated by his son Lev Sedov. In 1936 it became evident that the threat did not only come from the Right, when agents of Stalin’s feared security service, the GRU, broke into the Paris office on rue Michelet and stole many of the most important Trotsky documents. But this theft was on a rather modest scale when compared with what lay in store. It had not escaped the regime’s attention that the institute had snitched valuable archives right under the nose of Nazi Germany. “In German reports, the institute is described as ‘an intellectual center for the Marxist struggle against fascism.’ That was why it was considered so important to get their hands on the institute’s collections,” says Sanders.
For the Nazis, the Marx and Engels Archive was the Holy Grail. As both a Jew and the father of Communism, Marx was considered one of the brains behind the Zionist world conspiracy. Posthumus’s institute was also included in this conspiracy, and after its closure a report stated that the invasion of the Netherlands had prevented the emergence of “a powerful, global organization.”6
The first draft of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Marx and Engels Archive in Amsterdam was hunted by the Nazis, but there was time to bring it to safety in England.
Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus’s mission of saving the historical records of the European workers’ movement came to a tragic and abrupt close in the summer of 1940, when the white house on Keizersgracht 264 was sealed off. Posthumus did not only have his archive stolen from him, he was also relieved of his professorial post. Instead, Alfred Rosenberg’s newly formed organization, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), moved into the house, which now became the head office of Rosenberg’s plundering operations in the Netherlands. Reichsleiter (national leader) was a reference to the rank held by Rosenberg in the Nazi Party, the second-highest rank in the NSDAP. The national leaders formed the top echelon of the party and were only answerable directly to Adolf Hitler.
The ERR was set up in June 1940 as a direct consequence of the successful war on the western front. The outbreak of war had temporarily halted the building plans for the Hohe Schule der NSDAP near Chiemsee. But the preparatory work for the establishment of the school continued, and would even intensify as the hostilities escalated.
Amt Rosenberg’s ideological activities, which had previously focused mainly on domestic matters, now grew into an international operation. Until 1939 the Nazis had devoted themselves to fighting their internal enemies, such as German Jews, Socialists, Communists, liberals, Freemasons, and Catholics. This ideological war was now to fan out across Europe in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s victorious armies.
The Nazis waged their war on two levels: first, by conventional means, with their armies pitched against others in military conflict, and second, by war against the ideological opposition. The latter was not a conflict that took place on the battlefield; it was rather a silent war of disappearances, terror, torture, murder, and deportation, whose frontline soldiers were the Gestapo, the SD, and other parts of the regime’s terror machine. It was a war in which the intention was not to vanquish but to liquidate. On the eastern front, initially in Poland but later also in the Soviet Union, the conventional and ideological wars were fully integrated for the first time, with terrible consequences.
The ideological war was not only waged through the use of terror, for it was also a struggle of thoughts, memories, and ideas, a battle to defend and legitimize the National Socialist vision of the world. In this war, so to speak, the ERR mobilized the academic foot soldiers. The organization was destined never to get involved in the bloody, brutal acts, which were handled by the SS. The ERR only stepped in once these had been concluded. When the organization was formed in the summer of 1940, Alfred Rosenberg had already penciled in a dozen or so academic areas of interest for the Hohe Schule. For him, the Hohe Schule complex by the Chiemsee was merely the architectural manifestation of a project with far loftier ambitions. Hohe Schule stretched out its tentacles like an octopus over the Third Reich, by means of a series of external research institutes located in cities throughout the nation, acting as separate entities under the umbrella of the Hohe Schule. At least ten separate institutes were planned, each with a specific research area:
Munich: The Institute of Indo-European History
Stuttgart: The Institute of Biology and Racial Studies
Halle: The Institute of Religious Studies
Kiel: The Institute of Germanic Research
Hamburg: The Institute of Ideological Colonial Research
Münster and Graz: The Institute of German Folklore
Prague: The Institute of Eastern Studies
Römhild: The Institute of Celtic Studies
Strasbourg: The Institute for the Study of Germanicism and Gallicanism
Frankfurt: The Institute
for Research on the Jewish Question
The last-mentioned Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, the most extensive of all, was the only one to officially open during the war. Rosenberg opened the institute in Frankfurt in March 1941 with a conference on the Jewish question. The task before the ERR was to secure archives and libraries in occupied territories for later use in the institutes. But there were also plans for an ambitious library at the Hohe Schule: Zentralbibliothek der Hohen Schule. In 1939, Rosenberg had selected Walter Grothe as the director and chief librarian charged with putting together a collection. Grothe was a philologist who had earlier worked at the Rothschildsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt, founded by the Frankfurt branch of the Rothschild family at the end of the 1800s.
He had joined the party in 1931 and, among other things, had worked as a so-called Parteiredner, a public speaker who had received rhetorical training from the NSDAP. In a document from October 1941, Grothe provided a description of the purpose of the Zentralbibliothek der Hohen Schule: “The goal is to create the first great scientific National Socialist library, an entirely new sort of library.”7 In January 1940, Adolf Hitler gave his instructions on how the work on the Hohe Schule should proceed during the war:
“Its [Hohe Schule’s] construction will take place after the war. But in order to facilitate the preparatory work, I order Reich leader Alfred Rosenberg to initiate this preparatory work—particularly so that the research and work of creating a library can go on. Any departments within state or party that are affected by this, should give him every possible support in this endeavor.”
Six months later Rosenberg was mandated to carry out the following operations in occupied territories: First, to impound and confiscate valuable cultural artifacts considered as “ownerless Jewish property.” Second, to search public libraries and archives for material of value to Germany. And finally, to seek out and confiscate materials belonging to churches and Masonic orders.8
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