The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The city was the obvious nerve center for the mission that the researchers in YIVO would launch in the mid-1920s. The institute was built from nothing. There was no state sponsorship and in the early phase the headquarters were located in a room of Max Weinreich’s Vilnius apartment.

  But financial backing was soon in evidence from overseas, from donors in the United States, South America, and Germany—many of them Ashkenazi immigrants. Thanks to this support it was possible, in the early 1930s, to move into the house on Vivulskio gatvé 18, in order to have space for the fast-growing collection. Branches of the institute were also opened in Berlin, Warsaw, and New York. A small YIVO army of historians, ethnographers, philologists, literary experts, philosophers, writers, and other Jewish intellectuals set out to save the neglected cultural legacy of Eastern Europe’s Jewry. One of their number was Simon Dubnov, who now got to see his thirty-year-old dream fulfilled.

  The institute became the temple of a collectors’ cult, in which enormous amounts of firsthand sources, books, documents, photographs, recordings, and other items associated with Yiddish culture were saved, gathered, and studied.

  YIVO’s work had much in common with the movement that had emerged in several European countries, when romanticism and a latent nationalism awoke a newfangled interest in folkloric culture. Early pioneers such as Elias Lönnrot traveled to Karelia to gather the fairy tales that he would eventually incorporate into the epic poem Kalevala. A hundred years later the methods were more scientific, even if the enthusiasm and nationalistic undertones were much the same. The institute’s folkloric group was one of the most active, and already by 1929 it had collected over fifty thousand tales, sagas, and songs in Yiddish.5

  But YIVO was more than an institution to preserve a cultural legacy; it also collected contemporary information on Yiddish culture and initiated a project of linguistic reform: to standardize spelling in Yiddish. Correspondents in all countries where the language was spoken were encouraged to study and document local customs, and then pass on their material to YIVO. According to Cecile E. Kuznitz, the historian, the institute was not so much a historical project as a project for the future:

  As the most prestigious institution in its cultural movement, YIVO went far beyond collecting historical documents or publishing academic monographs to play a central role in the redefinition of Jewish peoplehood in modern times. . . . By focusing on a future when their . . . vision of Jewish scholarship would be within reach, YIVO leaders were able to look beyond the current economic and political marginalization and preserve their faith in their vision of Jewish culture.6

  By the end of the 1930s the collection had grown to the extent that the institute built a new wing to accommodate its material. In thirteen short years, YIVO had achieved miracles. Tied to the institute were over five hundred groups of collectors spread across the whole world. Before the war the archive was estimated to have included some 100,000 volumes and another 100,000 objects: manuscripts, photographs, letters, diaries, and other archive material.7 The institute had also built up one of the largest collections in the world of cultural and ethnographic artifacts relating to the history of Eastern European Jewry. In addition, the institute had built up an impressive art collection of about a hundred works by Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, who was one of the institute’s more prominent patrons and collaborators, alongside figures like Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.8,9

  • • •

  On September 19, 1939, two days after the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland, the Red Army took Vilnius. Poland’s fate had been decided in the last few days of August, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was formally a nonaggression pact, but in a secret appendix, Hitler and Stalin had divided up Eastern Europe between themselves. By the time over half a million Red Army troops crossed the border, the Polish army was already largely defeated, after the German attack of a few weeks earlier.

  After the invasion, Vilnius was assigned to Lithuania, which viewed the city as its historical capital. But this was a short-lived development, as in 1940 the Red Army also attacked Lithuania. In a series of brutal raids, the Soviet authorities clamped down on their enemies, real and imagined. Between 1939 and 1941, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Lithuanians, of which tens of thousands were Jewish, were deported to the east by the Soviet rulers.

  The hammer fell hardest on Jewish employers and factory owners, who saw their property nationalized and were often the victims of deportation. Jews owned the majority of private companies and industries in Vilnius. The new regime also suffocated the expression of free Jewish culture in Vilnius. Education in Hebrew was made illegal, as well as religious institutions and organizations. All newspapers in Yiddish except one, Vilner Emes, were shut down. Jewish “nationalism,” as well as all other expressions of national sentiment among minority groups, was systematically repressed. YIVO, which was nationalized, was renamed the Institute for Jewish Culture and absorbed into the Soviet academic system, formally by the Lithuanian Academy of Science in the newly formed Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania.

  An order was issued to seize the journalist and Yiddish researcher Zalmen Reyzen, who was the editor of the institute’s journal, YIVO-bleter. In 1941 the Soviet regime had him executed by firing squad.10

  Max Weinreich, the founder and head of the institute, did however get away, as he was on his way to a conference in Copenhagen when the war broke out in 1939. Weinreich immediately left Europe to set up the new YIVO headquarters in New York. At that time, it was the only remaining branch of the institute. Its Berlin office had been dissolved after the Nazis took over, and in 1939 its activities in Warsaw had also ceased when the city fell to the Nazis.

  YIVO in Vilnius may have been nationalized and robbed of its independence under the Soviet regime, yet something considerably worse lay in store. Premonitions of what this might be could already be discerned in those parts of Poland under Nazi occupation.

  The plunder of Polish libraries and collections had begun within weeks of the country’s surrender in 1939. But this time it was not the ERR that was responsible for the thieving, as this organization was only founded in the summer of 1940.

  Instead, the operation was taken care of by a special unit known as Sonderkommando Paulsen, led by an SS officer and professor of archaeology by the name of Peter Paulsen. Paulsen’s task was first and foremost to repatriate “Germanic” cultural treasures to the fatherland—as for instance the Veit Stoss Altar in the Church of the Virgin Mary in Kraków.

  The commandos made a raid on the seminary in Pelplin to secure the Gutenberg Bible that was known to be there, yet it was found that it had already been smuggled out of the country by Father Antoni Liedtke. When the SS realized that the Bible had slipped out of its hands, it took its revenge by burning a part of the Pelplin library in the ovens of a nearby sugar factory.11 The remaining books were transported to an old church in Poznań, which had been set up as a book depot. The church would eventually house over a million plundered Polish books.

  Sonderkommando Paulsen soon directed its attention to Jewish and Polish institutions, museums, libraries, and synagogues. The plunder of Poland was of an entirely different kind from the selective thieving that had above all afflicted Jews and ideological enemies in occupied western and southern Europe. In Poland, the plundering operation targeted the entire population. The reason for this was the quite different kinds of warfare being applied on the western and eastern fronts. Danes, Norwegians, the Dutch, Belgians, Frenchmen, and the British were Aryans and thereby fraternal peoples in what would one day be National Socialist Europe. The Nazis viewed themselves as liberators who had rescued these people from the pernicious effect of global Jewry. The regime devoted significant resources to propaganda exercises in an attempt to try to win over the “fraternal populations” of the West to the justice of its ideological purpose.

  The war in the East could not
have been more different. The millions of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe were not the only enemies—also, by extension, all the Slavs were too. It was in the East that Germany’s lebensraum would extend itself. In the future of Europe there was therefore neither space for Poland nor for the Polish people. The plunder was a direct consequence of this political line, and intended to rob the Poles of all forms of higher culture, learning, literature, and education. In this way its people would be intellectually reduced to subhumans.

  The plunder was closely associated with Intelligenzaktion. This was an operation aiming to destroy Polish culture and education by exterminating those who embodied it. In a very literal sense the intention was to “cut off the head” of the Polish social structure by murdering that society’s intellectual, religious, and political elite. Intelligenzaktion was put into effect immediately after the invasion in 1939, and worked in accordance with an already prepared list, Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book Poland), numbering some 61,000 names. The list included politicians, entrepreneurs, professors, teachers, journalists, writers, aristocrats, actors, judges, priests, and military officers—also a number of high-profile athletes who had participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.12

  The detention and murder of academics, teachers, writers, journalists, and priests went hand in hand with the plunder of libraries, universities, churches, and private collections. The scale of the plunder in Poland was enormous, with the theft of some two to three million books. The most valuable of these, including more than two thousand incunabula, were sent to Germany.13

  Because the goal of all this was intellectual subjugation, books were also stolen that had no interest from the point of view of Nazi “research”: schoolbooks, children’s books, and literary works. These fell victim to a systematic and planned eradication. Therefore, the destruction of books in Poland exceeded the numbers that were plundered. According to one estimate, some 15 million Polish books were destroyed in this operation.14 The stock of over 350 libraries was sent to paper mills for conversion into paper pulp.15

  The war in Poland was so violent and brutal that even many of the historically most valuable collections were decimated. Warsaw’s finest libraries were the hardest hit of all. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, German troops torched several collections, including the Biblioteka Załuskich, built in 1747, the oldest public library in Poland. Of the collection, which included some 400,000 volumes, maps, and manuscripts, only less than 10 percent survived. In October 1944 German troops set fire to the historical collection of the National Library. Eighty thousand early prints from the 1500s to the 1700s were destroyed. In addition, 100,000 drawings and engravings, 35,000 manuscripts, 2,500 incunabula, and 50,000 sheets of musical notes and plays were consumed in the flames.16

  Even the Military Library in Warsaw, with a collection of 350,000 volumes, was set aflame. The main building housed the Rapperswil Library, a Polish émigré library that had been set up in Switzerland in the 1800s and brought back to Poland in the 1920s.

  The extermination of Poland’s literary heritage was frighteningly efficient. Researchers have estimated that 70 percent of all books in Poland were destroyed or lost through plunder. Over 90 percent of collections belonging to public libraries or schools were lost or destroyed.17

  Only the Polish Jews and their culture were hit harder. Of a population of over 3 million before the war, only about 100,000 would still be alive in 1945. Much like the Polish collections, the Jewish libraries in Poland were not only plundered but also destroyed. One of the most valuable libraries that was lost was the great Talmudic library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin. One of the Nazis who took part in its destruction testified about the events:

  For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy which has been known as the greatest in Poland. . . . We threw out of the building the great Talmudic Library and carted it to market. There we set fire to the books. The fire lasted for twenty hours. The Jews of Lublin were assembled around and cried bitterly. Their cries almost silenced us. Then we summoned the military band, and the joyful shouts of the soldiers silenced the sound of the Jewish cries.18

  Even in Polish libraries, Jewish literature and books by Jewish writers were removed:

  “The primary intention of outlawing works by Polish Jews was quite simply to eradicate all Jewish influence from what remained of Polish culture. The Nazis even regarded guidebooks about Jewish places as dangerous and hostile,” writes the historian Marek Sroka, who has studied the destruction of Jewish libraries in Poland. Sroka suggests that “the plan to eliminate the Jewish cultural and literary contribution to Polish as well as European civilization became almost as important to the Germans as the physical extermination of the Jewish people.”19

  An explanation for the destruction of even the most important Jewish and Polish collections in Poland was that the plunder was less organized. The ERR had still not been involved in the operation. But the process could also be explained by the merciless nature of the war and the occupation. A great deal was destroyed by the sheer speed of it.

  The scale of the plunder and destruction of Jewish libraries stood in immediate relation to the extermination of the Polish Jews. Not only synagogues, schools, and organizations were plundered, but every single Jewish home; anything from large private libraries to the few books owned by the very poorest families. When the Nazis started large-scale deportation of Jews to the death camps in 1942, the ghettos were shut down and any libraries still remaining were plundered, burned, or sent to paper mills. When the ghettos were cleared, some collections were also found that the inhabitants had made desperate attempts to save. For instance, 150 Torahs from Kraków’s synagogues were found hidden in a specially constructed secret compartment in an attic above an undertaker’s shop. Most of the scrolls were burned.20

  In Warsaw, Sonderkommando Paulsen plundered thirty thousand books from the Great Synagogue, one of the largest in Europe. The synagogue was used after that as a warehouse for many of the city’s more than fifty Jewish libraries.21

  In April 1943 an uprising started among the remaining Jews in Warsaw’s ghetto. By this point in time, only fifty thousand people were left of a population that one year earlier had stood at almost half a million. The uprising was an act of desperation without hope of success, but on the other hand the men and women who had instigated it were well aware of what was to come. Most of the people who had been deported from the ghetto were already dead.

  The uprising was put down in an inferno, as the SS with the aid of flamethrowers and grenades torched the ghetto house by house. On May 16, the day the uprising was crushed, engineers from the SS, under the command of SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, mined the Great Synagogue. In an interview with the Polish journalist Kazimierz Moczarski, who shared a prison cell with him after the war, Stroop described the event:

  What a marvelous sight it was. A fantastic piece of theater. My staff and I stood at a distance. I held the electrical device which would detonate all of the charges simultaneously. Jesuiter called for silence. I glanced over at my brave officers and men, tired and dirty, silhouetted against the glow of the burning buildings. After prolonging the suspense for a moment, I shouted, “Heil Hitler,” and pressed the button. With a thunderous, deafening bang and a rainbow burst of colors, the fiery explosion soared toward the clouds, an unforgettable tribute to our triumph over the Jews. The Warsaw ghetto was no more. The will of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had been done.22

  • • •

  Two years after the invasion of Poland, the same kind of merciless plundering and destruction would be repeated on a greater scale when on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the attack on the Soviet Union. By this time, both Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler had built up highly functional plundering organizations, and their “expertise” would now be targeting the eastern front. The ERR h
ad grown into the most efficient plundering organization in the Third Reich. The ERR was also in a good position as a consequence of Alfred Rosenberg’s rise in the Nazi power hierarchy. Adolf Hitler had for long considered the Baltic German the party’s authoritative voice on questions relating to the East. Now that the invasion was in motion, Hitler finally gave Rosenberg a proper department to run: Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories). The function of the ministry was to establish and implement civil authority in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.

  The Reich Ministry would control the Reichskommissariats set up by the regime in the occupied territories to the east. Rosenberg had suggested that the Soviet Union should be subdivided into a number of smaller regions, in order to make the enormous area more manageable. Two of the intended six regions were established during the war. The Baltic region, White Russia, and parts of western Russia made up the Reichskommissariat Ostland, while Reichskommissariat Ukraine covered parts of what is now the country of Ukraine. Four other commissariats were planned for the regions around Moscow, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Volga basin.

  On paper, his promotion gave Alfred Rosenberg enormous power, but in practice his influence would always be undercut by Hitler. Rosenberg and the Führer quickly fell out about how best to handle the people in the East.

  Rosenberg regarded Slavs as Aryans, though admittedly on a lower level. He was convinced that Germany would never be able to control the enormous Russian territory without strategic alliances with the ethnic groups that had been forced into submission by Bolshevism. His plan, which he presented to Hitler, was that the Germans should portray themselves as liberators and then turn the strong anti-Communist and anti-Russian sentiment, which went back hundreds of years, against the rulers in the Kremlin. Especially the Ukrainians, Rosenberg felt, could be turned into allies against Bolshevism. For this reason, they should be given a measure of self-rule and be permitted to set up a vassal state under a Nazi leadership.