The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  While no exhibition was ever held in Frankfurt, greater success was had in Ratibor. By 1943, Amt Rosenberg’s departments of research and propaganda in Berlin had been evacuated along with the collections. Even the ERR’s local branches in the Soviet Union had been forced to retreat with the German army. Not only books and archives but also local academics and specialists were evacuated—including ten Ukrainian professors who, with their families, were moved from Kiev to Ratibor.11

  Research activity in Ratibor was focused on the countries to the east and related directly to the large amounts of material that had been collected for the Ostbücherei. Studies were made of subjects including the Soviet system, or there were polemical anti-Bolshevik propaganda pieces with titles such as “The Battle Against Bolshevism” and “The True Face of Bolshevism.” Above all, the purpose of the research was to demonstrate the true goals of Bolshevism, and that a Jewish conspiracy lay hidden behind this ideology. The research efforts were led by the librarian and historian Gerd Wunder, who had earlier been stationed in Paris and Riga, where he had been responsible for the confiscation of libraries. Wunder’s research department, known as Hauptabteilung IV, had established itself at Schloss Pless, outside Ratibor, where the greater part of the Ostbücherei’s collections had also been moved.12 Wunder also busied himself with the writing of “personal files” based on confiscated archive material of leading Jews such as members of the Rothschild family, Walter Rathenau, and Albert Einstein. His output included a family tree of the Rothschilds with their “connections.”

  The most startling project that took form in Wunder’s research unit was the large, secret exhibition that was put on for Nazi officials in May 1944, covering the full range of materials seized by the ERR during the war. It was also a combination of the work of the ERR with that of Hauptabteilung IV. The exhibition featured various sections in which material was shown from France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union, the latter of these taking the dominant role. There were also special displays relating to the Jews of Thessaloniki, the Rothschild family, and Freemasons. Some of the exhibition materials, posters, photographs, and illustrations have survived. They represent the ideas and conceptions that had been cultivated in the organization and were effectively a direct reflection of the worldview of their leader. Photographs show a relatively traditional exhibition with posters and tables of selected materials from archives and libraries.13

  Among the Freemasonry material, some of the items shown related to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill—both Freemasons since the early 1900s. Among other exhibits, there was a printed speech that Roosevelt had given at a Freemasonry convention, and a letter on Freemasonry sent by Churchill to the French-Jewish politician Léon Blum—who at this time was imprisoned at Buchenwald.

  The most telling of the surviving exhibition material is an illustration of a spiderweb, an attempt to visualize the world conspiracy, in which the Star of David—the Masonic symbol—and the hammer and sickle are equated with people such as Walter Rathenau, Cecil Rhodes, Kurt Eisner, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and the Rothschild family. These were Rosenberg’s demons, linked in a network that encircled the whole world in its evil conspiracy.14 As seen here, they were a pictorial representation of the conspiracy theory that Alfred Rosenberg had been constructing for almost thirty years. It was a holistic conspiracy; everything was connected. Enemies such as Socialists, Bolsheviks, Freemasons, Catholics, and capitalists—along with British, American, and French politicians—were all caught up in a single and all-encompassing net that had been spun by the Jews.

  For anti-Semites, the spiderweb was one of the most powerful metaphors. The Jew had often been likened to a spider, a parasite sucking blood from the people, culture, and nation. The spider metaphor functioned on several different levels; it worked as a simile for the economic extortion of the Jews, for the racial mixing and besmirching of Aryan blood, and the ancient blood libel—the ritual sacrifice of children.

  Another poster in the exhibition mapped the genealogy of the Rothschild family back to their ancestor James Mayer de Rothschild.15 The Rothschilds’ economic “world dominion,” going back to the 1700s, was the hub of this Jewish plot in the West by means of control of the global economy, while in the East it was Bolshevism that formed the center of the attack. The Third Reich, squeezed between these mighty enemies, struggled indefatigably for the freedom of Germans and the Germanic race.

  According to the National Socialist view of the world, it was never the Nazi regime that had waged offensive war; all it had done was pursue a defensive action against, on the one hand, “Jewish finance” in the West and, on the other, “Jewish Bolshevism” in the East. Before the war, in January 1939, Adolf Hitler had already said in a speech to the Reichstag: “International finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”16

  At this time what he meant by “extirpation” was not one and the same as Auschwitz—this “solution” to the Jewish question would only take form at a later stage. In the beginning the Jewish question was not about genocide but the exclusion of Jews from all areas of German society and culture—and later from Europe. In the 1930s the solution was legal, social, cultural, and economic segregation, with the goal of forcing Jews to emigrate. Plans were also made to move the Jewish population in Europe to a “reservation.” Central Asia, Palestine, and Madagascar were some of the suggested areas on the table. The Holocaust—mass murder—was a solution that emerged from mid-1941.

  Research under the leadership of Alfred Rosenberg toed this sort of line—in the fight against Jewry the researchers were considered to be “intellectual” warriors fetching their ammunition from the stolen libraries and archives—thus demolishing the Jewish conspiracy from within. By plundering and collecting the Jewish people’s historical, literary, and cultural legacy around Europe, Rosenberg and ultimately the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage were building the foundations on which, in the future, they would be able to defend and justify the extinction of the Jewish people. The completed studies were mere pseudoscience, designed to knit together the web of myths, misconceptions, and historical fabrications on which National Socialist ideology was based into a respectable scientific discipline.

  It was “research” with a clearly articulated goal. In his inaugural speech, when the institute was opened in 1941, its director Wilhelm Grau described his vision of a Europe free of Jews.17 In the following year came a new edition of Grau’s published work from 1937, Die Judenfrage in der deutschen Geschichte (The Jewish Question in German History). Just like Adolf Hitler, he blamed the Jews for the war. According to Grau, it was a war that could only end once the “Jewish question” had come to a point of solution.

  The “intellectual” justification for the Holocaust was never made as clear as when the Propaganda Ministry in 1944 commissioned Grau’s successor, Dr. Klaus Schickert, to write a follow-up to his book and doctoral thesis from 1937 about the Jewish question in Hungary, Die Judenfrage in Ungarn. Jüdische Assimilation und antisemitische Bewegung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (The Jewish Question in Hungary. Jewish Assimilation and Anti-Semitic Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). The work on the second book took place while the Hungarian Jews were being deported to Auschwitz.18 Schickert had earlier helped establish an anti-Semitic institute in Budapest, which, after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, was made into a state institution. The members of the institute were given leading positions in the new regime, with authority to quickly implement anti-Jewish policies.

  Rosenberg’s ambition was to present the “true history” of the Jews in Germany and Europe. But to understand why “the Jew” was the enemy before any other, one must take into consideration that for Nazi Germany’s ideologues, the history of the Jews was also that of Germ
ans. “It cannot be overemphasized that modern and contemporary German and European history must be written while taking the Jewish question into account,” wrote Wilhelm Grau, who argued that the Jewish problem hailed back to the medieval era.19 German history could only be understood on the basis of this thousand-year battle between Jews and Germans. By “studying the hard and finally victorious struggle between our German nation and the racially alien Judaism, we can come to a better understanding of the German character. And through this we not only improve our knowledge, we also strengthen our commitment to our national life,” wrote Volkmar Eichstät, librarian at Nazi historian Walter Frank’s National Institute for the History of New Germany.

  Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry put it even more clearly in 1944: “The Jewish Question is the key to world history.”20 The fundamental force driving history was, as Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Rosenberg had asserted, the struggle between the races—this being a sort of race-ideological equivalent of the class war of Marxism. At the center of this struggle stood the Aryans and the Jews, supreme antagonists to each other. In the National Socialist world, the Jews were an incarnation of historical evil, the root of all corruption, interbreeding between races, degeneration, fragmentation, and the suffering of the German people.

  In order for a new Germany to rise, the thousand-year-old adversary had to be defeated, not only in a physical sense but also symbolically. “The Nazis persecuted the Jews because they were a key element that came from within their own German and European-Christian civilization,” writes the historian Alon Confino. “Jews gave the overall meaning to the Nazi fight between good and evil: the Messianic struggle to create a Nazi civilization that depended on the extermination of the Jews. Creation and extermination were inextricably linked, giving meaning to each other.”21

  But it was not solely a war of physical extermination, it was also a battle for memory and history. And in this Alfred Rosenberg’s project played a leading role. The plundering of libraries and archives went to the very core of this battle for control of memory. This was also what set the book thefts apart from other kinds of looting, such as that of art. Art was also ideological, but only in a symbolic sense. Works of art were trophies that glorified leaders and the nation. Art would also reflect and legitimize the National Socialist ideals and the new human being. But the actual ideology would be underpinned by books and archives. The future would be built by a control of memory and history, on the basis of the written word.

  The Nazis strove to exterminate the Jewish people, but not their memory. “The Jew” would be preserved as a historical and symbolic enemy. That this was one of the goals of the Frankfurt institute was something that Alfred Rosenberg had already highlighted in his inaugural speech in 1941.22 In the speech, he predicted that there might one day come a generation, even in a National Socialist future, that judged his own. For this reason, the history of the Jews, their significance and their crimes, had to be preserved, and the merciless war into which the German people had been “forced” had to be possible to justify. For these reasons, the important expressions of Jewish culture, the libraries and the archives, were plundered but not destroyed. They were necessary in order to be able to write the history of the thousand-year battle and the final victory. Given that this was the battle that gave the movement its very meaning, the memory of the Jews had to be kept alive as a symbolic evil long after they had gone. In his book A World Without Jews, Alon Confino writes:

  Remembering the Jews after the victorious war would have been important precisely because total liquidation of the Jew could not have been achieved through physical annihilation alone; it required as well the overcoming of Jewish memory and history. A win in the war would have extinguished the alleged power of world Jewry in the White House and the Kremlin and eliminated the Jewish racial menace from German society, but the Nazi struggle against the Jews was never principally about political and economic influence. It was over identity and was waged by means of Nazi appropriation of Jewish history, memory, and books.23

  It was therefore both meaningful and significant that the ability to remember became an act of resistance in its own right. When Herman Kruk, the librarian at the ghetto library in Vilnius, buried his diaries in the forced-labor camp in Estonia just before his death in 1944, it was in a sense an attempt to defeat the perpetrators of the violence against him by preserving his memories. Despite the ambivalence that was a defining mark of the work done by the Paper Brigade in Vilnius, and the Talmudkommando in Theresienstadt, both groups found a source of hope in the thought that, ultimately, they were saving their own history.

  There was also another closely related aspect in this struggle for memory, words, and books. After all, it was being fought between possibly two of the world’s most highly literary and intellectual people—between two of the “people of the book.” It was a similarity noted in the 1939 diary of Chaim Kaplan, a Jewish teacher in Warsaw:

  We are dealing with a nation of high culture, with “a people of the book.” Germany has become a madhouse—mad for books. Say what you will, I fear such people! Where plunder is based on an ideology, on a world outlook which in essence is spiritual, it cannot be equalled in strength and durability. . . . The Nazi has robbed us not only of material possessions, but also of our good name as “the people of the Book.” The Nazi has both book and sword, and this is his strength and might.24

  Maybe it was symbolic that Chaim Kaplan’s diary, which had been left behind, became one of the most important testaments of Jewish life in Warsaw before and after the invasion. In 1942, when he realized that he was about to be arrested, the diary was smuggled out. His last entry reads, “13,000 people have been seized and sent off, among them 5,000 who came to the transfer of their own free will. They had had their fill of the ghetto life, which is a life of hunger and fear of death. They escaped from the trap. Would that I could allow myself to do as they did! If my life ends—what will become of my diary?”25

  • • •

  At Section VII of the Reich Security Office some other research projects were destined to go on until the end of the war. However, the research that had taken form within the RSHA was different and, in many ways, more fanciful. Just as Alfred Rosenberg’s version of reality had permeated his activities, the RSHA research had aspects that clearly reflected Himmler’s special interests in Freemasonry and occultism.

  The collections and research projects at the RSHA had been evacuated to various castles in Central Europe. At Schloss Niemes, Section VII had begun compiling a registry of occult science—Geheimwissenschaftlichen. The result was a catalog running to more than four hundred pages, with seven thousand books and eighteen thousand journals on subjects such as astrology, spiritualism, mysticism, prophecy, hypnosis, alchemy, hedonism, and dream interpretation. One of the most curious RSHA research projects went under the name of Leo and was headed by SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Göttsch, one of the most trusted men of the chief of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner had replaced Reinhard Heydrich after his assassination in Czechoslovakia in 1942.

  Göttsch had worked earlier at the foreign department of the SD, but his military career had slowed after he contracted tuberculosis. Instead, he was set the special task of studying Section VII’s section on Masonic literature with particular emphasis on occult material. Assisting him was SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Richter, who was the RSHA’s expert on Freemasons and who had also been responsible for compiling the section on witchcraft and magic. Richter drafted reading lists for Göttsch on subjects such as magic, telepathy, and spiritualism, and even on books from the pornography collection. After the evacuation from Berlin, several rooms of the fifteenth-century castle Neufalkenburg (known today as Nový Falkenburk) in Czechoslovakia were given over to Göttsch’s top secret project, and a small occult library was built up. Richter, with responsibility for this part of the operation, put out calls for important works, which were located in other confiscated collec
tions and brought to the castle. Even secret reports from the SD, which in the 1930s had hounded various anthroposophical groups in Germany, were a part of the collection.26

  Paul Dittel, the last head of Section VII, claimed under interrogation after the war that the purpose of Leo was to create “some kind of Masonic order or esoteric sect” connected to the SS.

  Dittel stated that Kaltenbrunner was striving to build up a fraternal Nazi order whose members would be free to devote themselves to whatever they wished, while remaining loyal to the regime and functioning as “observers and informers.”27 According to Dittel, Göttsch’s research was about creating the required underpinnings of such an organization—most likely by studying how the Freemasons, through rites and secrecy, had built up loyal brotherhoods. The project was given the very highest priority by the top leaders of the SS, at a time when it was increasingly clear that Germany was about to lose the war. This seems to suggest that the “order” could have functioned as a way of preparing underground activities in a post-Nazi Germany.

  Another project that had been in progress for considerably longer was Heinrich Himmler’s Hexenkartothek, which had already been set in motion in the mid-1930s. The research into witchcraft, which went under the name of Hexen-Sonderauftrag, was an investigation into witches and their persecution. Himmler had given orders that this subject should be submitted to a “scientific investigation.” One of the reasons for the SS leader’s interest was supposedly that one of his ancestors, Margareth Himbler, was burned at the stake in 1632, in Bad Mergentheim, after being found guilty of witchcraft.28