The Frankfurt institute had built up “the finest Jewish library on the Continent,” as the American historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted puts it.14 In 1941, the first operational year of the institute, 2,136 crates of plundered books arrived. As with the other library projects, there was a constant discrepancy between the incoming flow of books and what the staff had time to process. The bounty was so extensive that it would probably have taken the Nazi librarians and archivists decades to catalog everything. Of the aforementioned 2,136 book crates, the institute only had time to unpack 700 and to catalog some 25,000 books. Only about a tenth of the collection would ever be cataloged.
By the spring of 1943 the institute had built up a collection of over half a million books—in no small part because of the work of Johannes Pohl.15 In his earlier life as a Catholic priest, Pohl had personally visited and secured many of the most important Jewish libraries in Europe. In Amsterdam, the Jewish libraries Ets Haim and Rosenthaliana had been seized. In Paris, he had overseen the taking of Alliance Israélite Universelle’s library, and in Rome, the ERR had confiscated Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano. Over ten thousand books had been plundered from the Jewish community in Thessaloniki. On his visit to Thessaloniki early in 1943, Pohl had personally brought some of the congregation’s archives back to Frankfurt.
And from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, train after train pulled in with plundered Jewish archives and libraries, in many cases from communities that by 1943 had already been extinguished. Books came from Kiev, Minsk, Riga, and hundreds of smaller communities in between. Above all, they came from Vilnius.
In the latter half of 1943 the evacuation from Frankfurt began. Because of its western position and its important armaments factories it was particularly targeted by Allied bombing raids. About twenty bombing raids during the war reduced Frankfurt’s renowned medieval city core, the largest in Germany, to gravel and lumber. There were no great distances involved; the institute was established in Hungen, a town about thirty-one miles north of Frankfurt where the collections were kept in eight different storage depots. During the last two years of the institute’s existence, the collections grew further when libraries from both the east and the west were moved as the Germans retreated. In 1945, it is calculated, there were about a million books in Hungen, in addition to the large number of archive materials and Jewish religious artifacts.16
The libraries and archives that had been plundered by the ERR had been divided up between the institute in Frankfurt, which received many of the most important Jewish collections, and the various departments in Berlin. The ERR had set up a so-called Buchleitstelle in Berlin, a kind of sorting center that checked through the inventories and decided where they should be sent. One tragic consequence of this work was that many of the collections were fragmented. As far as the ERR was concerned, there was no inherent value in keeping a plundered collection together. After all, the operative point was to build entirely new collections. Particularly affected by this were the smaller, more specialized collections, in which books with a “Jewish” theme could be set aside for the Frankfurt institute, while others were sent to the Ostbücherei or the Zentralbibliothek der Hohen Schule (ZBHS).17 The ERR voluntarily shared or was made to share what it had in the way of books and archive material with other organizations, institutes, universities, and libraries. However, the materials were also divided between different projects within Amt Rosenberg. The result of this fragmentation was that many collections, for instance those from Vilnius and Thessaloniki, ended up in a number of places. This fragmentation was a kind of destruction in its own right, a fate that led to many libraries never again being reassembled.
Apart from the institute in Frankfurt, the ZBHS was the most important recipient of books. The library was one of the first of Rosenberg’s collections to be evacuated from Berlin, beginning in October 1942. Initially the library moved into the Grand Hotel Annenheim, near Lake Ossiach in southern Austria, but it was soon moved again to the large Renaissance castle of Tanzenberg, just outside the town of Sankt Veit an der Glan.
As the crown jewel of Rosenberg’s library projects, the ZBHS would be awarded some of the finest collections. But the foundation of the library had been a couple of collections acquired from German academics, including the Orientalist and racist Hugo Grothe, who in the early 1900s had advocated genocide as a way for Germans to gain lebensraum in the colonies. There was also a library belonging to the church historian Ulrich Stutz and the Napoleon researcher Friedrich Max Kircheisen. Alfred Rosenberg had added his own private library to the collection. However, these collections would only form a small part of what the ZBHS amassed during the war. In all, between 500,000 and 700,000 books were brought to Zentralbibliothek der Hohe Schule in Tanzenberg.18
The collection could be regarded as a cross section of the ERR’s plundering during the war. There were books from almost every country in which the ERR had operated: France, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, but also Belgium, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia. There were even books that had been taken from the British Channel Islands, which Germany had occupied in 1940.19
The Frankfurt institute did not get all of the Jewish literature; a good deal also went to the ZBHS, including a number of valuable private collections such as libraries that had belonged to members of the French Rothschild family. The ZBHS received almost nine hundred crates of material from the IISG in Amsterdam, including most of the institute’s collection of newspapers and journals.20 Further, the library absorbed valuable libraries and archives from the Soviet Union, for instance, 35,000 books that had been stolen from the libraries in imperial palaces outside Leningrad. Even rare and very early prints that had been seized in Novgorod and Kiev were sent to Tanzenberg, including books from Kiev Pechersk Lavra, better known as the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, founded in the 1000s.
The ERR’s main depot would be in neither Austria nor Hungen. Instead, it was in the small town of Ratibor, today known as Racibórz, in southwest Poland. Ratibor was the main market town of Upper Silesia and had traditions going back to the early Middle Ages. Like so many places in these borderlands, it had a mixed population of Czechs, Poles, and Germans. An important reason for the choice seems to have been the town’s strategic position between Berlin, Kraków, and Vienna. The possibility of waterborne transport was just as important—the Oder flowed through the town on its way to the Baltic. ERR personnel arrived in Ratibor in May 1943 to make preparations, and a few months later an initial delivery of ten railroad cars of books and archives arrived from Berlin.21 A lot more would arrive by the river route, with over six thousand crates of material transported via barges on the Oder.
The new head office of the organization was established in a Franciscan monastery by the river, while the Ostbücherei was installed in what had previously been a bathhouse. A bank, the town library, a synagogue, and a number of warehouses were also occupied. The ERR’s departments for press, music, popular culture, and science all followed suit and moved to Ratibor. The lack of available space soon meant that they had to leave the town and seek premises in the countryside; among other places a cigar factory was requisitioned along with several nearby castles. Trains loaded with furnishings plundered from Jewish apartments in the M-Aktion provided the various departments with what they required. The dispersal of the activities was an attempt to keep the operation as covert as possible. For instance, the owners of the castles were allowed to remain as residents in order to preserve an outer semblance of normality.
The sorting operation, Buchleitstelle, also moved to Ratibor, and this seems to suggest that all the plundered archives and libraries had been taken to Ratibor for sorting. The Allied landings in Normandy and the advances of the Red Army on the eastern front meant that large numbers of books arrived in the last years of the war. A list of collections checked through by Buchleitstelle in the summer of 1944 included many that had belonged to eminent French Jews, including the former di
rector of the French National Library, Julien Cain, and the general secretary of French PEN, Benjamin Crémieux—both men had been deported to Buchenwald.22 Furthermore, the archives of the French-Jewish politician Léon Blum and the author André Gide ended up in Ratibor.
A significant part of the activities in Ratibor was centered on the Ostbücherei, which had expanded enormously as a consequence of the plundering in the Soviet Union. The Ostbücherei’s collections were stored in the synagogue and a half-dozen other buildings. The large Lenin Library, which arrived in seventeen railroad cars from Minsk, was transferred to the cigar factory outside Ratibor. Hundreds of thousands of other books and journals were stored in a medieval castle, Schloss Pless, not far from Ratibor. The Turgenev and Petljura libraries, along with a few other émigré libraries found by the ERR in the west, filled several rooms in the synagogue. Plans for a western equivalent of the library on eastern lands, which would be known as the Westbücherei, never materialized.23 Books continued arriving in Ratibor right up to the closing moments of the war. Not even the Germans seem to have known how many books the Ostbücherei had amassed in Ratibor. According to some estimates, the figure may have been at least two million volumes, and quite possibly even more.
[ 13 ]
“JEWISH STUDIES WITHOUT JEWS”
Ratibor–Frankfurt
When the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage opened in Frankfurt in 1941, there was a sense that this was taking place not only in a city with a certain amount of symbolism attached to it but also in a unique building. The institute moved into one of the Rothschild family’s palaces at Bockenheimer Landstrasse 68.1 That Europe’s leading anti-Semitic institute opened in Frankfurt rather than elsewhere, according to Alfred Rosenberg, was a symbolic ending of the power of the Rothschilds over the city.2
It was in Frankfurt that the family’s ancestor Mayer Amschel Rothschild had laid down the foundations of its banking dynasty at the end of the 1700s. From here, he had sent out his sons across Europe to establish a new, powerful banking dynasty with a network of family ties.3 As the Nazis saw it, Frankfurt was the birthplace of a globally reaching evil—and as far as they were concerned, no other family had ever embodied the destructive avarice of Jewish finance as much as the Rothschilds. In placing Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in the heart of this “evil,” there was the desire to both symbolically and literally separate the Jewish world conspiracy from one of its most important roots.
The city’s Nazi mayor, Friedrich Krebs, had used the Rothschildsche Bibliothek as an enticement to bring Rosenberg to Frankfurt. In a letter, Krebs wrote: “The collection was built up during a time when Frankfurt’s political and cultural life was under Jewish influence, but in our time this library offers a unique opportunity to research Judaism and the Jewish Question.”4 This was one Jewish library that the Nazis did not need to steal. Instead, the Frankfurt institute housed its own collection there until the evacuations began in 1943. Much like the RSHA’s Section VII and other departments of Amt Rosenberg, the Frankfurt institute devoted considerably more time and effort during the war years to the transportation, storage, sorting, and cataloging of books than to any actual research. Sustained research efforts were seen as something that would follow after the war, when the rich material stolen from the regime’s ideological enemies could be properly studied and evaluated.5
Like the high school near Chiemsee, the many research institutes that were being planned under the umbrella of the Hohe Schule would open in the future, after Germany had won its victory. However, several of these institutes were in a preparatory phase during the war, taking in literature, archives, and other plundered materials, even though they had not yet officially opened.
The most important wartime task was the actual plundering, which supplied the institutes with extensive materials to use in their eventual research. Materials were distributed to, among others, the Institute of Biology and Racial Studies in Stuttgart, the Institute of Indo-European Intellectual History in Munich, and the Institute of Ideological Colonial Research in Hamburg. Yet another new institute was being planned in 1944 as a consequence of the great haul of books and archives belonging to the Communist Party in the Soviet Union: Institut zur Erforschung des Bolsjewismus (Institute for Research on Bolshevism).6
But, in the end, the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage was the only one of Hohe Schule’s institutes to be fully up and running during the war. While research on Germanic people, Celts, and religion could wait until after the war, the Jewish question was too important to be postponed. In a broader sense it was no coincidence that the institute opened at the same time as the plans for the Holocaust were about to be set in motion.
Although the collection of material had the highest priority, there was nonetheless a certain amount of research going on. After the evacuation of 1943, the institute’s research division moved into the medieval castle in Hungen, which looked like a sort of fusion between a hunting lodge and a fairy-tale castle, with its redbrick details and winding turrets. The organization allowed the owners of the castle, the Solms-Braunfel family, to stay on as a cover for the operation. Throughout the war, the institute remained in close contact with political developments concerning Jews and anti-Semitic legislation in German-occupied territories, and regularly received secret reports from the foreign ministry and its consulates.7 Meanwhile, the institute’s “Jewish experts” contributed their knowledge of the various Jewish cultures with which the Germans were coming into contact.
From the very beginning, the Frankfurt institute would also busy itself with the production of studies, articles, and books, based on the rich material that had been plundered from all over the Continent. By building up Europe’s and probably also the world’s foremost Jewish collection, the institute’s researchers had the power to form the future of Jewish studies. The perspective of these studies was made abundantly clear in an article about the institute in the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, in 1942: “For the first time in history: Jewish studies without Jews.”
The most important outlet for this research was the institute’s own journal, Der Weltkampf (The Battle for the World), which was issued monthly and described itself as a “monthly journal on world politics, folk culture, and the Jewish Question in all countries.” For the first issue, six thousand copies were printed. Most of its subscribers were teachers and researchers.8 The journal would also produce special themed issues. Number 2/1943 focused on the Jewish question in France, with contributions from French anti-Semitic correspondents. The issue was also published in French. The special feature was a consequence of the rich pickings that the institute had received from France.
Among other pieces, the issue contained an “analysis” of a letter sent by Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet of the 1800s, to Baron James de Rothschild in Paris, to ask for some money. Another article analyzes letters in which Albert Einstein had directed criticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, founded in 1925. Einstein was himself on the board of the university. Both articles referenced materials that the ERR had found in Paris.9 Although the documents hardly revealed any conspiracy worth mentioning, they were used in an insinuating way to uncover the hidden economic, political, and social networks of the Jews. Any evidence of a conspiracy was never presented, nor was it necessary. This was research carried out by believers for the delectation of other believers. Every little connection was regarded as a thread in a global conspiracy. The research was characterized by the same sort of philosophical approach that Goebbels had taken to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—namely that it was the inherent rather than the factual truth that was decisive.
Also in the institute’s journal were articles based on newly discovered material and “study visits” that the researchers had made. Johannes Pohl, the head of the Hebrew collection, wrote about his findings in Vilnius on “Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union.” Pohl would also publish shorter studies on Jewish c
ulture in Greece and the Ukraine. Other researchers at the institute devoted themselves to subjects such as the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy or Jewish ritual murders.
In addition to Der Weltkampf, the institute issued books, writings, and anthologies. Particular emphasis was given to handbooks, as typified by Lexikon der Juden in der Musik. A Lexikon der Juden auf dem Theater was also being planned and the author was going to be the literature scholar Elisabeth Frenzel, who in 1943 had published Der Jude im Theater. Frenzel was highly influenced by the star of German racial research, the “Race Pope” Hans F. K. Günther—her book on Jewish theater has been described by the German literature expert Jochen Hörisch as one of the “worst anti-Semitic publications” of the Third Reich. The purpose of the handbooks was to identify “Jewish” influences in theater and music, in order to separate these from Germanic culture. The handbooks addressed themselves to professionals working in these fields—such as theater directors and music teachers—just in case they accidentally performed a composition or work of a “Jewish” nature.
Ambitious works were also being planned on the history of the ghettos and anti-Judaism. For the former, the institute asked local administrators in Eastern Europe to contribute with maps of various ghettos. It is also likely that a relatively unknown branch of the Frankfurt institute that had opened in Lodz at the end of 1942, called the Institut zur Erforschung der Ostjudenfrage, was participating in the project. This institute, which was headed by a professor of theology named Adolf Frank, was a special department whose function was to “conduct research” into the Lodz ghetto while it was still in existence. The institute, which had three employees, also collected material for anti-Jewish exhibitions. For instance, the institute placed classified ads in local newspapers, offering to pay for “judenkündlichem Material [Jewish materials].”10
The Book Thieves Page 26