In the summer of 1940, ERR in Paris set up a head office for the occupied western territories under the name Amt Westen. In the same year an operational network was set up in Western Europe with a number of local working groups tasked with making raids, sorting, and confiscating materials—known as Hauptarbeitsgruppen. Each group was responsible for its own geographical area: France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Under these groups, a number of specialized units were intent on various kinds of materials. Sonderstab Bildende Kunst focused on art, while other departments were sectioned off for music, churches, archaeology, and ancient history. Sonderstab Musik, which plundered instruments, sheet music, and music literature, stole in the region of eight thousand pianos in France alone.9 The first department set up under the ERR was Sonderstab Bibliothek der Hohen Schule—this library group was led by Walter Grothe, head of the Zentralbibliothek der Hohen Schule, and Wilhelm Grau, head of Rosenberg’s Frankfurt institute.10 ERR would be responsible for the plunder of over one thousand large libraries in Western Europe.
At Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, the ERR established a sizable operation with a few dozen employees—led by the tough SS-Sturmbannführer, Alfred Schmidt-Stähler, who proudly signed his initials in SS-inspired runic letters. The fact that SS men were also working within Amt Rosenberg is yet one more complicated detail in the power structure of the Third Reich. SS men were found in all areas of the Nazi state and party machinery, although loyalty was predominantly owed to whoever paid their salaries.
Later in the autumn of 1940, ERR was given responsibility for the plundering of art in France, which would turn out to be the organization’s most extensive operation during the war years. However, art theft would be a sideshow as far as Alfred Rosenberg was concerned. Most of the artworks confiscated by the ERR were sold, reserved for Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum in Linz, or passed to Hermann Göring’s private collection at Carinhall. Hitler distributed the lucrative art hauls among various organizations. One reason that this task often, but not always, fell to the ERR was that Rosenberg did not have any plans or particular interest in trying to keep the art.
But it was an entirely different matter when it came to books, archives, and documents, over which the ERR and Rosenberg engaged in ferocious bureaucratic battles with a long line of competitors, chief among them the SS and the RSHA’s Section VII. It was a showdown between two competing library projects, playing itself out using all available methods of the internal warfare continuously being waged within the movement: subterfuge, lies, flattery, alliances, and horse trading. But very often in the competition between organizations and leaders in the Third Reich, it was also a question of dynamism—in other words, who got there first. The SS, with its enormous military and police strength, had an obvious advantage. Rosenberg’s organization lacked any troops of its own; however, he alleviated this imbalance by means of a number of strategic alliances, most importantly with Hermann Göring. It was certainly a curious alliance, because Göring was probably the least ideological person in the top echelons of the Nazi leadership, but it did serve their common interest. Rosenberg got the soldiers he needed and transportation from the Luftwaffe, and Göring got as much art as he could pack into his private train.
The enormous scale and intensity of the Nazi plundering operation has to be understood from this perspective—the force of it was fed by the ferocious inner life of the Third Reich. But in order for this competition not to swerve into pure anarchy, it also had to be reined in by rules and regulations. For this reason, an unholy alliance was forged between the SS and Amt Rosenberg. Himmler would get the libraries and archives that were useful for “intelligence purposes”—in other words, material helpful to the SD and the Gestapo in their fight against the enemies of the nation. Rosenberg would get the libraries and archives that had a value in ideological research. In simplified terms this could be seen as a subdivision between “historical” and “contemporary” material. In reality things were never quite so simple.
One of the first battles, a bitter and protracted fight, was fought over IISG’s valuable archive on Keizersgracht 264. Reinhard Heydrich tried to secure the archive for the RSHA, while Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar for the Netherlands, wanted to keep it in Amsterdam. Robert Ley, leader of the Nazi union movement, took the view that his organization was the proper owner of this Socialist legacy.11 The ERR won the fight for the archive, which really fell within the jurisdiction of the RSHA, because Hitler finally gave his backing to Rosenberg—and because the ERR had physically taken possession of the archive. The ERR was also the first to get inside the institute’s Paris office, which housed some of the most important collections belonging to Russian émigrés. The office was raided just three days after the fall of Paris. Yet in spite of having preempted the competition, the ERR lost the bureaucratic struggle for control of this archive, which was handed over to the SS.
After the ERR had made a rough assessment of the IISG’s archive and library, it confirmed that this would be its biggest seizure in the Netherlands. In the library of the institute alone there were more than 100,000 books, and the archive held at least another 180 shelf-yards of materials. It took until 1943 for the ERR to pack everything into nine hundred large crates, dispatched to Germany by train and cargo ship. Yet the ERR had not found an essential part of the archive: the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels documents.
“After the Munich Accord in 1938 when the Western powers gave Hitler Czechoslovakia, Posthumus became convinced that war was inevitable, and for this reason he had the Marx and Engels archive shipped to the institute’s branch in Oxford. One has to say he was extremely prescient,” says Huub Sanders, sitting in his office.
Staff at the IISG had also had time to destroy the most compromising material, such as correspondence with political prisoners from Germany. Posthumus was questioned by the SS, but because he was not politically active, and was for this reason viewed as an academic, he managed to get himself released. The loss of the IISG did not stop Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus from immediately starting another collection.
“Incredibly enough he managed to set up a new institute that began collecting material about the war while it was still ongoing. It was in his nature to always keep collecting, irrespective of the circumstances. This institute was formally established three days after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, and today is known as Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies. However, when Posthumus went back to Keizersgracht 264 after the liberation of the Netherlands, there was not a great deal left. Everything had been stolen; it was utterly empty. The Nazis had even taken the furniture.”
• • •
Not far from the Rembrandt Museum lies the Portuguese Synagogue, a large brick building from the end of the 1600s. The synagogue, which has been described as one of the most beautiful in the world, is a monument to the presence of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam. Outside, I meet Frits J. Hoogewoud, a man in his seventies, who throws his arms into the air like a conductor when he speaks. Hoogewoud, now retired, was previously the chief librarian of Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. He has made it his life’s task to map out the city’s Jewish libraries and their changing fortunes during the war.
The synagogue is surrounded by a low brick building, which functions almost as a perimeter wall. I follow Hoogewoud to one of the houses outside the synagogue where Ets Haim, the renowned library, is kept—which is what I came here to see. The world’s oldest Jewish library still in use, it has been the cultural and intellectual heart of the city’s Sephardic community since the 1600s.
“The library is almost four hundred years old. It was started as a school for Jews who had fled Spain and Portugal,” says Hoogewoud. The light is dim in the three large rooms of the library, which are lined with golden-brown, wine-red, and cobalt-blue books from floor to ceiling. Through two octagonal openings one catches a glimpse of the upper floor of the library, reached via a beautiful wooden spiral staircase.
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“The library is absolutely unique, this building was erected specifically for the library, and it was constructed to let in natural light. It was dangerous to have naked flames in a library, of course,” says Hoogewoud, and points up at the skylights.
What really makes Ets Haim unique is that it reflects the existential crisis faced by many of the Sephardic Jews once they came to Amsterdam. “Many of the Sephardic Jews had converted to Christianity. And then suddenly they came to a place where they once again had the opportunity of practicing their original religion. It was not an easy thing. They had to rediscover their identities, and they did it by reading, writing, and engaging in debate. Who are we really? Is the Jewish faith truer than Christianity? This library is the product of that search,” Hoogewoud explains as we take a seat in the library’s reading room.
Sephardic identity had been formed during one of history’s veritable ages of gold. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews brought with them to their new homes a unique educational culture—which, for many years, was the finest in Europe.
The Iberian Peninsula, named Al-Andalus by the Arabs, had been conquered by the Muslims of North Africa in the early 700s. This was the beginning of an almost five-hundred-year epoch of Islamic high culture, excelling in areas such as art, astronomy, philosophy, literature, and poetry—owing a great deal to an invention that had spread from the East. The Chinese had invented papermaking as early as the Han dynasty in 200 BC, but it was the Muslims who brought it to Europe.12 The spread of paper facilitated the Muslim translation movement, in which works of the classical era spanning a variety of disciplines were copied and translated into Arabic. The caliphate, which financed much of the work, sent out learned people all over the world to collect manuscripts. The center of this movement was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad—the Muslim world’s correlative to the library in Alexandria—where hundreds of thousands of texts from Roman, Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Indian literature were translated, copied, and commented on. Much of this translation was done by Syrian Christians and Jews, who were proficient in Greek, Latin, and Arabic.
Córdoba became another center of this movement. The competition between the Umayyad dynasty of the Iberian Peninsula and the Abbasid dynasty, which ruled in Baghdad, was not only military but also cultural. In the tenth century, Córdoba held one of the world’s largest libraries—the Umayyad library is believed to have contained some 400,000 volumes. There was nothing comparable in Christian Europe, and it would be another few hundred years before the use of paper became widespread.
Al-Andalus was also a golden age of Jewish culture. Just as in Baghdad, many of the translators were Jewish students and scholars. Under their Muslim rulers, Jewish communities enjoyed a high level of autonomy, and Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to philosophy, medicine, mathematics, poetry, and religious studies. The reason for the existence of such large numbers of Jewish intellectuals, translators, and scholars in the Muslim world was the unique Jewish scholastic culture, which, even then, was in excess of a thousand years old, founded on an intellectual, religious, and philosophical discourse on how one should interpret and live in accordance with the Torah.
Many learned Jews in Al-Andalus held high positions at the court. Yet, even though they enjoyed greater freedoms here than in Christian Europe, they did not entirely escape persecution. When the political stability that had been a mark of Al-Andalus began to crumble after AD 1000, there was increasing insecurity also for the Sephardic Jews. A terrible awakening came when the Jewish population in Granada was massacred in 1066, in a Muslim pogrom. The great catastrophe took place after the last Muslim stronghold in Granada fell to Christian Spaniards in 1492. The Christian conquerors gave three choices to the city’s Jewish population: convert to Catholicism, and thereby earn permission to stay, or be exiled from Spain. The third option, if they chose neither to convert nor to emigrate, was death. Most decided to emigrate east and form new settlements in Venice, Belgrade, and Thessaloniki. Others moved to the west, including those Portuguese Jews who were later expelled from Portugal.13
But thousands of Sephardic Jews decided to convert so that they could stay. Despite their concession, Marranos—or conversos as they were often called—were never accepted. The Inquisition in the 1500s mercilessly hounded the Marranos, thousands of whom fell victim to torture and burning. Ultimately most Marranos had no choice but to emigrate, only to find that in exile even more humiliation and isolation awaited them, as they were often rejected by Jewish communities.
Many of these doubly condemned people decided to settle in the Netherlands, where they were treated with more understanding than in many other places. They are the subject of the book with the bullet hole at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Samuel Usque was a Portuguese Marrano Jew, and the book, Consolaçam às Tribulaçoens de Israel, which in translation means “Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel,” was a religious self-help book for Marrano Jews, written in 1553. It tells the story of the long suffering of the Jewish people, and the consolation to be found in studying the Torah and the prophets. Usque argues that Marranos can only ever be liberated from their torments by openly returning to and embracing the Jewish faith. Most of the Jews who went to Amsterdam did precisely that, but they also kept certain aspects of their unique culture.
“What the Sephardic Jews brought here was the cultural melding that had taken place in Spain between the Jewish, Arab, Christian, and even classical culture. One can see the influences in the beautiful illustrations in the manuscripts here. Amazingly profuse floral patterns, inspired by Muslim art. They were very much formed by the culture they had come from. Clearly they did not only want to move on, but also remember the land they had lost,” says Heide Warncke, a librarian at Ets Haim, who joins us in the reading room.
The library was founded in 1616 and today contains some thirty thousand books and over six hundred manuscripts, the oldest of which dates back to 1282. The collection covers a broad spectrum of subjects: poetry, grammar, calligraphy, philosophy, mysticism, and religion. “The library reflects the development of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam over a period of four hundred years. Here you can follow the spiritual, religious, and cultural changes that society went through,” Hoogewoud tells me.
The Sephardic Jews who had been Marranos would form their own community and cultural identity in the larger Jewish society. They were always in a minority, even within the broader Jewish population. But after several centuries had passed, as had happened during the expulsions from Spain in 1492, the persecution also reached the “Jerusalem of the West.”
“In actual fact, at first after the occupation began in 1940, not very much happened. Life went on as before. Also, cultural activities carried on, people wrote books, organized seminars, and put on plays. It is difficult for us to understand it, now that we have the benefits of hindsight. But they were so used to the freedom and tolerance they had been living under that they just couldn’t conceive of it being withdrawn one day,” says Warncke.
“It happened gradually. Step by step the Jewish population was separated from others, just as the Nazis had done in Germany,” Hoogewoud interjects.
The ERR was not in a hurry to impound the Jewish libraries. Only in August 1941 was an operation launched with a focus on the most important Jewish collections. For the first year, it had mainly been concerned with political opponents such as the IISG, the church, and Freemasons’ orders. It was no surprise that the Jewish collections should come into the spotlight in 1941, as this was the moment when policy hardened toward the Jewish population. From the beginning of the year, Dutch Jews were forced to register, and by February the first deportations to Buchenwald were in motion. In August, the SD sealed off a number of Jewish libraries, including Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana, whose reading rooms had already been closed to the general public. Bet Hamidrash, a valuable library belonging to Amsterdam’s Ashkenazi Jews, was also closed. The libraries were not available to anyo
ne except SS and ERR staff members. What they had not realized was that some of the most valuable books had already been hidden.
Six months earlier the Portuguese congregation had picked out its most valuable artworks, which had been sent to the Rijksmuseum’s bunker under the sand dunes by the coast. They also had five crates packed with books and manuscripts from Ets Haim, including eight Hebrew incunabula, sixty manuscripts from the 1600s and 1700s, and over 150 printed illustrations. The crates were placed in a vault of the bank Kas-Associate on Spuistraat in Amsterdam.14 The reason for these precautions was not the risk of plunder, which was probably not considered likely at this time, but rather the fear that the library might be damaged or destroyed in a bombing raid.
Fontaine Verwey’s rescue operation at Rosenthaliana was more conscious of the precarious situation. The library’s former curator, Louis Hirschel, had put together a secret list of the most valuable writings that had to be saved. Together the two men made their way into the sealed-off building and smuggled out, among other things, some sixty manuscripts, twenty or so incunabula, and a drawing by Spinoza from the 1600s, all of which were hidden in the cellars.15 They also hid the library’s catalog so that the ERR would not be able to check what was missing.
The ERR was extremely keen to get its hands on Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana, and this can be discerned in a weekly report sent from the group’s headquarters in the Netherlands, in the same month that the libraries were sealed off:
It is possible that previously unknown sources can be discovered here from the Cromwell era, both from the so-called glorious revolution of 1668, and the alliance between England and the Netherlands. In particular, new conclusions may emerge on Cromwell’s relations with the Jews—and maybe even Jewish influence on the creation of the British secret service.16
The Book Thieves Page 13