The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The report demonstrates just how ideologically motivated the ERR’s work was. The libraries and the archives were not stolen primarily because they were “Jewish property” but rather because it was believed that they might provide materials backing up the theory of Jewish world conspiracy. There was a highly particular background to the Nazis’ interest in Jewish-British relations. Hitler and Rosenberg were both admirers of the British Empire, and found it fascinating that a small minority could run India, whose population numbered hundreds of millions. Rosenberg tried until the very end to make Nazi Germany form an anti-Bolshevik pact with Great Britain. Even Hitler was pursuing the same train of thought. The war with Great Britain, and the country’s stubborn refusal to make peace, was partly blamed on “Jewish influence.” That Cromwell, as a result of Menasseh ben Israel’s diplomacy, had allowed Jews to return to England was viewed as evidence of such Jewish influence.

  “It was a very ridiculous way of looking at it. That it was the British-Jewish connection that was the real enemy. But I think it’s important for us to understand that this was really how they thought about things. This was how the Nazis legitimized what they did. In the final analysis, they wanted to prove that Nazism was right, that this was the logic of what they were doing,” Hoogewoud explains.

  In 1942, both Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana were visited by one Johannes Pohl, whom Alfred Rosenberg the year before had appointed as head of the Jewish section of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt. Pohl had previously been a Catholic priest, but he had converted to National Socialism. At the end of the 1920s he had been a promising biblical scholar whose doctoral thesis had been a study of the prophet Ezekiel. In the early 1930s he had spent several years in Jerusalem, studying biblical archaeology.

  When Pohl returned to Germany in 1934, he gave up the priesthood in order to marry and at the same time began publishing articles in anti-Semitic journals such as Der Stürmer. Oddly enough, he had never previously during his years of research expressed any anti-Semitic ideas, which would seem to suggest that he was either an opportunist or had cultivated a personal anti-Semitism, which he only dared articulate once the Nazis had come to power. Pohl issued special warnings about the dangers of the Talmud, on which he also wrote an anti-Semitic book.17

  Pohl was an advocate of Judenforschung ohne Juden—Jewish research without Jews—which drew him to Rosenberg’s circle and also the institute in Frankfurt, where he later became the organization’s foremost book plunderer.

  After Pohl’s inspection in 1942, it was decided that both Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana should be taken to the Frankfurt institute. In the autumn of 1941 the ERR and the RSHA also started raiding Jewish private collectors in the Netherlands. One of the better-known libraries to be taken was that of Isaac Leo Seeligmann, the son of the historian, bibliographer, and Zionist Sigmund Seeligmann, who had died in 1940. Isaac Leo Seeligmann had inherited one of the finest Jewish private libraries in Europe. Himself a biblical scholar and teacher of Jewish history, he had followed in his father’s footsteps and built up an impressive collection of his own. Together, the two libraries contained between 20,000 and 25,000 books.18 The RSHA took charge of Seeligmann’s collection, most likely for the reason that his father had been a well-known Zionist. Another valuable Jewish book collection confiscated by the ERR belonged to Paul May, the banker, who committed suicide with his wife by taking cyanide on the same day that the Netherlands capitulated to Nazi Germany.

  In 1942, the ERR commenced operation M-Aktion (Möbel [Furniture] Action) along with the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), which handled the deportation of the Dutch Jews to concentration camps. As part of the operation, homes belonging to deported Jews were plundered to provide German soldiers and settlers in the East with household goods.

  Alfred Schmidt-Stähler writes in a report that the organization made 29,000 successful raids in the Netherlands.19 In most cases the homes were comprehensively cleared of all furnishings and goods, which were loaded on trains or ships and sent to Germany or Eastern Europe. The operation also cleaned out the literary inheritance of Holland’s Jews, down to the tiniest bookcases or scattered volumes on bedside tables. It is estimated that the ERR seized between 700,000 and 800,000 books. Some of these were distributed to schools in the Netherlands or handed over to local Nazis.20 Others were sold or shipped to Germany.

  It took until the middle of 1943 before the ERR finally packed up Ets Haim. Worse still, it found the list of documents that had been moved to the bank vault, a list that the staff had forgotten to hide. The congregation’s secretary was frog-marched to the bank, accompanied by personnel from the ERR and the SD, where most of the books and manuscripts were confiscated. In August the contents of the library, 170 crates, were loaded on a train to Frankfurt.

  It would take another year before Rosenthaliana left Amsterdam, as the library had become the subject of yet another dispute. The collection belonged to Amsterdam’s university and was therefore public, and not Jewish, property. Even Amsterdam’s pro-German mayor stepped in to save the collection and keep it in the Netherlands. While the war of words raged, Herman de la Fontaine Verwey seized the opportunity to smuggle out the documents that had earlier been hidden in the cellar. In the autumn of 1943 the university began evacuating other valuable collections to bunkers under the sand dunes by Zandvoort, outside Haarlem. By secreting the Rosenthaliana manuscripts among these collections Fontaine Verwey managed to bring them to safety.21 Despite the protests, no one could stop the ERR from getting its hands on Rosenthaliana. “The law of property has no meaning when it is a matter of Jewish objects” was Alfred Rosenberg’s final answer to Amsterdam’s mayor. In June 1944 the library was packed into 143 crates and loaded on a train eastward.

  The mass deportations of Dutch Jews began in the middle of 1942. Most were sent to the transit camp of Westerbork. Almost every Tuesday until September 1944 a freight train departed to the east. Sixty-eight trains, carrying 54,930 persons, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nineteen trains, with 34,313 people, went to Sobibór. Most of the deportees were murdered on arrival.22 Other trains, with far fewer passengers on board, were bound for the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. In two years, three-quarters of the Jewish population in the Netherlands was exterminated. Of the Sephardic Jews, only about eight hundred would survive.

  Rosenthaliana’s curator Louis Hirschel and Isaac Leo Seeligmann were among the deportees; both were sent with their families to Westerbork. According to a colleague who visited Hirschel in the barrack where he was interned, he was working right until the end on a bibliography that would be the foundation of a book on the history of the Netherlands Jews: “In the dark barrack, surrounded by wretchedness and misery, he wrote his extensive bibliography, without any access to other literature, on small scraps of paper.”23 Hirschel was deported with his wife and four children to Poland. His wife died in Sobibór in November 1943. Hirschel survived until March 1944; he was most likely selected for slave labor, which extended his life by a few months.24 Isaac Leo Seeligmann was “lucky”—his name was on a list of “selected” Jews to be sent to the Nazi “model camp,” Theresienstadt. By a remarkable coincidence, Seeligmann was reunited with his library before the war was over.

  [ 7 ]

  THE HUNT FOR THE SECRETS OF THE FREEMASONS

  The Hague

  In order to understand alchemy you have to ask yourself the question, What is gold? Is it the metal you are after or something else? Alchemy is about the search for one of life’s great secrets, namely the secret of eternal life.”

  Jac Piepenbrock gives me a watchful look, as if to assure himself that I am keeping up, while he explains the innermost essence of alchemy. I am not sure that I do, but in spite of this I nod by way of an answer.

  “But what actually is the meaning of eternal life? Is it life here on earth, or the soul’s ascent into eternal light
? Alchemy is the search for life’s deepest meaning,” Piepenbrock continues. He is a short man, a Freemason with fine silky white hair. In his arms he holds a book of such large dimensions that two people are required to turn its pages. While Piepenbrock opens the eight-inch-thick volume, his colleague Theo Walter carefully turns the yellow, almost brown pages. Every page or two is richly illustrated with curious, frightening woodcuts. Snakes writhing around humans. A field in which the ground is covered in skeletons surrounded by swarms of birds. Dragons devouring one another. A mob with clubs and lances, striking a prostrate man. Doves armed with bows and arrows. Stars, angels, planets, and signs that I have never seen before. The book, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, is an anthology from 1702 of alchemical literature, compiled by the medical doctor Jean-Jacques Manget. The magical book is in stark contrast to the room in which we find ourselves—an oxygen-depleted, cramped little hole without windows. The glum gray metal shelves, which Walter and Piepenbrock roll back and forth, give you the impression that you have found your way into an archive of forgotten auditors’ reports. But if you can see beyond these meager surroundings, the room holds one of Europe’s rarest collections of books on Freemasonry, alchemy, magic, the mysteries of antiquity, cathedral builders, and Knights Templar.

  The Freemasons’ lodge of Grootoosten der Nederlanden, which traces its history back to 1756, has its principal seat behind an anonymous dark green door in the center of The Hague. A few decades back, like so many other Freemasonry orders in Europe, it began to open up its once-so-secretive activities. The lodge now houses a cultural center, Cultureel Masonniek Centrum, with a reading room and a museum about Freemasonry. The order owns a collection of more than 25,000 valuable artifacts associated with Freemasonry: antique regalia, art objects, drawings, and etchings. But the lodge’s most famous collection is the Bibliotheca Klossiana—one of the world’s oldest Freemasons’ libraries. The collection has its origins with the German doctor, historian, and Freemason Georg Kloss, who built up the collection in the early 1800s. “Kloss was a frenetic collector of books and manuscripts on Freemasonry and other subjects of interest to the lodges. He managed to build up the best collection on the subject in Europe,” says Piepenbrock, who is the keeper of the library. After Kloss’s death the library was bought by Prince Frederick of the Netherlands, who donated the collection to the order of which he was the grand master. The Kloss collection consisted of seven thousand books and two thousand manuscripts.

  In addition to that library there was an extensive archive on the 250-year history of the order, and materials from some eighty discontinued Dutch Masonic orders. Today the collection fills some eight hundred yards of shelves. “Kloss collected books and manuscripts in order to look for the origins of Freemasonry. How the rituals were first created, when they were first written down, how they evolved, and which were the true rituals of Freemasonry,” says Theo Walter, who is the librarian of the order.

  Freemasonry was a subject that greatly interested the Nazis, but despite this, the Third Reich’s assault on Freemasonry is a chapter that has rarely been examined. After the Nazis seized power in Germany, the German Masonic orders were some of the first organizations to come under attack, but at the same time the persecution of Freemasons, with a few exceptions, was not as systematic or brutal as that pitted against Jews and political opponents. The Nazis’ opposition to the orders was rather an attack on the spirit of Freemasonry, which was considered an ideological rather than a racial problem of the kind presented by Jews, Roma, and Slavs. In other words, the Nazis sought to do away with Freemasonry as a phenomenon, but only to a lesser degree with the actual Freemasons themselves.

  Hermann Göring proclaimed at an early stage that “there is no place in National Socialist Germany for Masonic orders.”1 At first the regime tried in a variety of ways to get the lodges to disband or give up Freemasonry in order to pursue other things. People who were, or had been, members of Masonic orders were denied membership in the Nazi Party. Freemasons were also subjected to harassment and boycotts, and were often fired if they worked in the public sphere. However, many were later able to restart their careers.

  Masonic activity in Germany at the time was extensive, with upward of eighty thousand Freemasons. Many of them were or had been high-status individuals in German society. Some of the larger orders tried as early as 1933 to adapt by taking names such as the National Christian Order of Frederick the Great or the German Christian Friendly Order.2 In order to be able to continue with their activities, the regime required the orders to stop using the word Freemasons, break off all international ties, exclude members of non-Aryan origins, open up their secret activities, and stop using rituals that could be linked to the Old Testament.

  In 1935, Freemasons’ orders were entirely banned and labeled “enemies of the state.” With this, Germany’s Masonic organizations were disbanded and their property confiscated. Heinrich Himmler, who was hugely interested in the orders, saw to it that the SD and the Gestapo impounded the Masonic libraries and archives. These later formed the foundations of the occult collection at the RSHA Section VII.3

  Also in the 1930s, a number of campaigns were held to denigrate Freemasonry, by the conversion of some confiscated Masonic lodges into museums where exhibitions were held. One example was the notorious Entartete Kunst in 1937, when the Nazis arranged an exhibition of modern “degenerate” art. “The shaming exhibition” was a concept to which the Nazis returned time and time again in their propaganda. In addition to “shaming exhibitions” about art, similar events were organized on the themes of jazz and Jewish culture. The exhibition Sowjet-Paradies, in 1942, achieved particular popularity, presenting items that had been brought back after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The exhibition, inside a large pavilionlike marquee, covered an area of nine thousand square yards. Its purpose was to highlight the poverty and misery in Russia under the Bolsheviks. According to reports, some 1.3 million Germans visited the exhibition.4 The “shaming exhibitions” were not only supposed to pour scorn and humiliation on their subjects, but were also preventive measures. In the exhibitions on Freemasonry there was a desire to reveal the secrets of the orders by letting the German people step into the rooms of these mysterious fellowships, the idea being to show how the orders were secretly devoting themselves to perverse, un-German, and Jewish rituals, which presented a real threat to Germany. Particular emphasis was given to ritual objects such as human skulls, bones, Hebrew texts, and other “Oriental” objects. There was a sensationalist focus on the secret blood rituals that the Masons supposedly practiced. The largest of these museums, opened in a confiscated lodge in Chemnitz, are reported to have had a million German visitors.

  Masonic orders had never, in fact, presented any sort of political threat to the National Socialists. Most of the orders were wholly apolitical. But in the apocalyptic worldview of the Nazis, the Freemasons were performing a special function in the Jewish world conspiracy. The secret societies had been conspiring for centuries to overthrow Germany.

  When the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, reported in 1935 on the disbanding of the Masonic orders, an astonishing accusation was kicked into the ring: the Freemasons had started the First World War. According to the newspaper, Freemasons had planned the 1914 murder in Sarajevo of the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand.5 Thereafter, Freemasons had conspired to force Germany into the war, and Freemasons had ensured Germany’s defeat.

  Such conspiracy theories flourished in far-right circles in Germany during the interwar years. The German general Erich Ludendorff, who had played a decisive part in the last few years of the First World War, was one of the most outspoken critics of Freemasonry. In the last year of the war, Ludendorff was the most powerful man in Germany, both planning and commanding the German offensive on the western front in 1918, when the country depleted its last reserves of strength in this final attack. The failure of the offensive, and the Allied counteroffensive
, not only led to the collapse of the German lines but also to the psychological breakdown of Ludendorff himself. When Ludendorff failed to broker a truce in the autumn of 1918, the German emperor relieved him of his command.

  The revolution broke out in Germany in November of that same year. Ludendorff fled to Sweden with the help of a forged passport, and he waited out the revolution on the country estate of the Swedish landowner and equestrian, Ragnar Olson, in Hässleholm. Broken down, embittered, exiled, and disappointed with the humiliating Versailles Treaty, Ludendorff wrote his memoir of the war. Published in 1919, it became one of the sources of the Legend of the Dagger Thrust, which took on such decisive importance in the fortunes of the National Socialists. Ludendorff, unable to shoulder his own failings in the events that had taken place, argued that it was Social Democrats, Socialists, and Freemasons on the home front that had caused the defeat. Without this “dagger thrust” in the army’s back, Germany would have been victorious.

  Ludendorff’s descent into the murky gloom of conspiracy theories did not end with his memoir. Gradually he was drawn into the right-wing radical circles of Munich and the NSDAP. During the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 when the Nazis tried to take power, Ludendorff marched alongside Adolf Hitler to topple the government. Unlike Hitler, he escaped a prison sentence.

  During the 1920s, Ludendorff began to view the Freemasons as the root of a global conspiracy. In 1927 he published the book Eradication of Freemasonry Through Uncovering of Its Secrets, in which he further developed his conspiracy theories. Although Ludendorff was billed as the sole author of the work, he actually cowrote it with his wife, Mathilde, who if possible was an even more fanatical opponent of Freemasonry. Later she would publish her own pamphlet, Mozart’s Life and Violent Death, in which she alleged that the composer was murdered by his Masonic brothers because of his breach of the order’s vow of silence. She also claimed that Freemasons were responsible for the deaths of Martin Luther and Friedrich Schiller.6