The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  When Kuperminc puts the book back, I see other labels from the institute on book spines along the shelf. Some look almost new, while others are in varying degrees of disintegration. Many of these books have stayed here, almost untouched, since the Second World War.

  “We have thousands of books here marked with Nazi stamps,” Kuperminc tells me in his halting English, with a heavy French accent.

  From the Freemasons in The Hague I have taken a fast train south to Paris. Here in the French capital, the ERR and the RSHA would initiate the most extensive plundering operation in Western Europe. The center of ERR’s art plundering operation was the commandeered museum Jeu de Paume, in central Paris, where tens of thousands of works of art were brought, sorted, cataloged, and dispatched to Germany. Some of the most audacious of all thefts of libraries and archives took place here in France. One of the victims was the Alliance Israélite Universelle, at 45 rue la Bruyère in Paris, south of Montmartre, where I meet Jean-Claude Kuperminc, head of the organization’s library and archive. A short man with thinning hair, about fifty, he has spent years researching the whereabouts of the library during the war years.

  The Alliance Israélite Universelle was established partly as a result of the so-called Damascus affair—a pogrom triggered in 1849 by the rumor that Jews were behind the ritual murder of a monk in Damascus. The city’s synagogue was attacked by a mob, and a number of Jews were imprisoned and submitted to sadistic torture, including having their teeth pulled. The events were noted on the international stage, and a Jewish delegation was sent to negotiate.

  “It was an important event, because it was the first time that Jews took international action to help other Jews in the Middle East. It was on the basis of this that the idea for the Alliance emerged. The reason for it was that one wanted to protect and strengthen the rights of Jewish minorities everywhere. The founders were all children of the French Revolution. They belonged to the first and second generations of Jews that had been allowed to become proper citizens of France, with equal rights. The organization was set up to disseminate these ideals,” explains Kuperminc.

  The Alliance assisted Jews fleeing the pogroms in tsarist Russia and helped them resettle in France and the United States. But its most important work was the establishment of an international school system for Jewish children. By the turn of the twentieth century it was running about a hundred schools in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, with a total of 24,000 pupils. The education was largely based on the Enlightenment ideals of the founders: French culture, language, and civilization. However, the Alliance very clearly distanced itself from the emerging Zionist movement, which campaigned for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

  “Alliance was working for the integration of Jews in their own countries. In France we spoke of régénération—the rebuilding of identity based on modern Western culture alongside Jewish knowledge and culture,” Kuperminc explains. As part of the strong pedagogical ambition a library was set up. “They wanted to gather knowledge about all the different Jewish cultures that existed in the world. But also about Jewish history. Some of the most valuable manuscripts of the collection, from Cairo, are Jewish writings from the 800s. Others go back to the Jewish philosopher Maimonides in the 1100s. But above all the library is known for its modern-day collections of books, journals, pamphlets, and newspapers. It includes an almost complete collection of books and writings published on the Jewish question in Germany from 1700 and up to the 1900s, including anti-Semitic publications, and the organization also collected writings on the notorious Dreyfus affair in the 1890s.

  “In the 1930s it was one of the most important Jewish libraries in Europe, maybe the most important anywhere. Everything published that touched upon Jewish themes, both studies and subjects, was bought and collected.”

  To house the growing collection, a library was built toward the end of the 1930s in rue la Bruyère. The library in which we stand is an eight-story, functionalist tower, located in the inner courtyard of a palatial Parisian building. The low ceilings and the narrow, almost claustrophobic, stairs leading from floor to floor are reminiscent of a multistory parking garage for books. The building was ready in 1937, and before long it held the Alliance library of some fifty thousand books and the extensive archive and collection of journals.

  But the tenure of the new library would not be a long one. The shelves would soon be filled with books of an entirely different kind, by the occupying German power.

  Baron Kurt von Behr, enlisted to lead the ERR’s operations in Western Europe via the office of Amt Westen, arrived in Paris with the German army in June 1940. The administrative office was at first set up in the Hôtel Commodore, but was later moved to a residential house on avenue d’Iéna, which had been confiscated from the Gunzburgs, a Jewish banking family.1

  Von Behr, an aristocrat who learned French as a prisoner of war during the First World War, was almost a caricature of a Prussian nobleman—according to witnesses he often wore a corset, highly polished boots, and a monocle.2

  The Alliance Israélite Universelle had already taken precautions to save the collection, but like many other libraries, organizations, and collectors, it misjudged where the real threat lay. The Alliance had built a bunker in the cellar to protect the most valuable parts of the collection from bomb attacks. However, it could not save it from looters. In a last desperate measure, just before the fall of Paris in June 1940, manuscripts and archive materials were loaded on a truck that tried to make it to Bordeaux. It never arrived.

  “No one really knows what happened to the truck, but judging by the details we’ve managed to obtain, it seems that German troops caught up with the vehicle.”

  When in the summer of 1940 the ERR secured the office at 45 rue la Bruyère, it found the greater part of France’s most important Jewish collection still intact on the shelves. As with the IISG in Amsterdam, the ERR also commandeered the organization’s premises. Already by August 1940 the library at rue la Bruyère had been packed into crates ready for shipment to Germany. Most of the library was sent to the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt. The empty shelves in the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s library were soon filled with other plundered collections, as the ERR began using it as a book depository.

  By September 1940, after seven weeks of plundering, Alfred Rosenberg was able to state with some satisfaction in a report that a significant amount of booty had fallen into their hands in Paris. Among other items, the ERR had confiscated a number of valuable libraries belonging to members of the French Rothschild family.3 An even more valuable seizure was made at the Rothschilds’ renowned Paris bank, de Rothschild Frères, which, for more than a hundred years, had been one of the world’s biggest banks. The enormous archive of the bank apparently filled more than 760 crates. This, from a Nazi perspective, was priceless material for “research” into the networks of Jewish world capitalism. In addition to the Rothschilds’, libraries were taken from prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Léon Blum, Georges Mandel, Louise Weiss, and Ida Rubinstein. Several of these libraries had great historical and cultural value, containing first editions with personal dedications from Marcel Proust, Salvador Dalí, André Gide, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, and Wanda Landowska.4

  Ten thousand books were stolen from the rabbinical school, Ecole Rabbinique, in Paris, including a very valuable collection of Talmuds, while four thousand books were plundered from the Fédération des Sociétés Juives. Synagogues and Jewish book dealers were also plundered—for instance, the book dealership Librairie Lipschutz had its entire stock of twenty thousand books stolen.

  Only a handful of collections gave the looters the slip; for instance, the little Yiddish library Bibliothèque Medem, founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Gestapo did not manage to find the cellar where the books had been hidden. But it was scant consolation, as the library only amounted to some three thousand volumes.5r />
  The plunder in France was enormous; estimates suggest that the ERR stole 723 larger libraries containing more than 1.7 million books.6 This would be dramatically stepped up once the ERR instigated its M-Aktion in France and plundered the homes of Jews who had fled or been deported. In Paris alone, 29,000 apartments were comprehensively cleared, and everything packed onto trains and sent to the East.7

  There was something extraordinarily malevolent about this systematic sweeping out and expurgating of the existence of Jewish people in Europe. All personal belongings that were left—such as letters, photo albums, and notes—were confiscated, scattered, burned, or pulped in paper mills. After the homes had been emptied, new owners moved in. It was as if the Jewish people who had lived there—their lives, memories, and thoughts—had never even existed.

  How many private libraries and books were seized by M-Aktion is unclear, but it must have run into millions. The operation was on such a scale that three processing stations had to be set up, manned by slave workers, to sort, mend, and load the confiscated property. One of them, in a warehouse in the Thirteenth Arrondissement in Paris, was called Lager Austerlitz by the Germans. The prisoners chose instead to refer to it as “Galeries Austerlitz,” an ironic allusion to the luxurious department store, Galeries Lafayette.8 The work of handling the confiscated property continued right up to the moment when the troops of the Western Allies were drawing close to Paris in August 1944.

  A book from the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, with the label from Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question still on the spine. The library was plundered during the war and taken to Frankfurt to be included in the institute’s collection.

  A literary cleaning-out of a different order was carried out in Alsace-Lorraine, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany. Here the Nazis seized all French literature in an attempt to “Germanize” the area and wipe out the French culture and language.9

  Although the ERR confiscated the lion’s share of the pickings in France, the RSHA did not come away with nothing. Many of the libraries and archives from more politically active Jewish organizations were later handed over to the RSHA, including certain parts of the archive of the Alliance. By the time the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage formally opened and a conference was held on March 26, 1941, many of the Paris libraries had already arrived in Frankfurt.

  In his inaugural speech, Alfred Rosenberg boasted that the institute possessed the world’s finest Jewish library: “This library, a part of the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question, which opens today, already contains a large number of documents that are significant in Jewish history, and for Europe’s political development. This is now the largest library in the world devoted to Judaism. In the coming years this collection will be expanded in a most purposeful manner.”10

  Any books that bear the stamp of Alliance Israélite Universelle belong to the comparatively small number that had time to be cataloged. The inflow of plundered collections was far greater than the staff could ever cope with. By 1943, half a million books had arrived in Frankfurt.11

  The historian Philip Friedman argued that it was important for the Nazis to plunder Jewish libraries and institutions active within higher education, research, or other intellectual activity. The plunder would thereby serve a dual cause, partly depriving the Jewish population of its cultural base and learning, and partly enriching Nazi ideological research. From this perspective, the Alliance Israélite Universelle was a prime target.

  • • •

  The taxi driver stops abruptly and points down a side street. I hesitate. This does not seem like a street where one might find a renowned library. The traffic exhaust–stained balconies are cracked and seem ready to collapse at any moment. I have taken the address from a letter, and I am now on the other side of the city, in the southern part of the Latin Quarter. The buildings in the street remind one of a housing project but at the same time there is something rounded and Jugendstil-like about the architecture. Later I find out that the houses were built after the war, to provide homeless Parisians with a roof over their heads.

  The house number, which I have jotted down on a scrap of paper, leads me to an apartment block with an anonymous-looking entrance where a couple of walkers have been left. After spending a few moments looking through the long list of names I have been given, I find, between the Missoux and Chauvell families, a little lopsided label with the text “Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev.” I have seen this name before, in the ERR’s reports from Paris, but I was unsure of this library’s continued existence until I found a long essay on its tragic and fascinating fate, written by the historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted.

  In the apartment on the first floor I meet Hélène Kaplan, an elderly woman with raven-black hair and bright red lips, who walks with the aid of a crutch. Kaplan is the librarian and head of the association that runs the library.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to get accustomed to the gloom; only a few sparse rays of sunlight penetrate the small, covered windows in the library. The apartment is absolutely crammed with books, from floor to ceiling. Between the bookcases are yellow-faded busts of Russian authors, old suitcases, trash bags, and dilapidated reading lamps. In a corner lies a Russian rag doll and a model of an Orthodox church, carved in wood. Hundreds of books that have no space on the shelves lie piled up on the floor or on tables sagging under the weight.

  “We have a special floor, you know, books are very heavy,” says Kaplan, striking her crutch several times into the rug.

  Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev belongs to a special category of libraries that fell victim to the plunder during the war: the émigré libraries. For hundreds of years Paris had been a city that attracted political and intellectual refugees: artists, authors, and others who had found their way to the city, looking for a place to exercise free thought and expression. Anarchists, Communists, dissidents, stateless aristocrats, monarchs, and dictators have all at various times made Paris their home.

  In the 1800s the city took in a wave of political immigrants from the east. Some of the earliest settlers were Poles, forced to escape Poland after the November 1830 uprising in Warsaw, an attempt to reestablish a free Polish state, which had not existed since 1795. One of those who settled in Paris was the Polish prince and statesman Adam Czartoryski. During the Napoleonic era he had been the foreign minister in tsarist Russia, but in 1830 he joined the rebellion and was chosen as the first president of Poland. After the uprising was crushed in 1831, more than six thousand officers, politicians, and intellectuals fled or were forced to leave Poland, in what is known there as the great migration. Czartoryski’s residence at the Hôtel Lambert by the Seine was to become a center for the Polish émigré community and the opposition that yearned to create an independent Poland once more. In 1838, the Bibliothèque Polonaise was founded and soon became the epicenter of a colorful French-Polish cultural scene, including personalities like Frédéric Chopin, George Sand, Zygmunt Krasiński, and the romantic Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. The library became the largest autonomous Polish cultural institution outside Poland, and an important symbol for the Polish struggle for independence.

  The Poles were not the only group of exiles that had come from tsarist Russia. A wave of political and intellectual refugees from Russia would also settle in Paris during the 1800s. As early as 1825, after the Decembrist revolt, a large group of Russian writers had been exiled by the tsar. Even greater numbers emigrated when the political upheavals intensified at the end of the decade. The strict censorship imposed by the tsarist regime led to the creation of an independent literary scene and publishing environment in Paris.12 Before long the focus of this activity centered on the Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev. The library was founded in 1875 by the Russian revolutionary German Lopatin with the assistance of his compatriot, the author Ivan Turgenev, who at this time was living in Paris.

  “Ger
man did not merely want to create a library, but a meeting place for the revolutionary youth. It was a Russian library, but it was entirely autonomous of the Russian state. The library has preserved this outlook right up to the present day,” Hélène Kaplan tells me as she leads me into the little reading room. One of the long walls is entirely bare, apart from a bust of Turgenev.

  Lopatin was one of the first Russian revolutionaries to be influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Earlier, he had been imprisoned by the tsarist regime and sent into exile to Stavropol in Siberia. From there he managed to escape, get to France, and join the First International.

  The library’s basic collection was supplied by Turgenev, who donated some of his own books; the author also organized a literary matinee in Paris to collect donations of money and books. The library, which was given its current name after the death of Turgenev in 1883, organized readings, concerts, exhibitions, and revolutionary Christmas parties.

  “It became one of the biggest Russian libraries in Europe. There were Russian libraries in other cities, but they did not survive. This is the largest and oldest of these libraries still in existence. It is something quite unique, because it was never given any financial support from Russia, and only grew because of support from various Russian exile groups—often by people donating books or working as volunteers at the library.”

  The library and the revolutionary sphere around it would be a nursery for several generations of Russian revolutionaries. One revolutionary who worked at the library before the First World War was a Russian named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. After the failed revolution in Russia in 1905, the Bolsheviks had decided to move their activities to Paris. Lenin, who hated the city and referred to it as “a dirty hole,” arrived in Paris under protest in 1908.13