The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

Czechoslovakia was the only country behind Soviet lines that had been permitted to form an independent republic after the war, even though it was short-lived. This meant that the collections that had ended up here were subjected to the restitution philosophy that was common practice in the West but also to the diametrically opposed approach in Eastern Europe. It ended up being a sort of semi-restitution.

  In 1945 the collections left in Theresienstadt were brought to the museum in Prague, as was one of the survivors of the Talmudkommando, Otto Muneles, who was made chief librarian for the museum’s collection. Plundered books also arrived from other sources. In the SS castles on the Czech side of the border, including Schloss Neufalkenburg and Schloss Niemes, hundreds of thousands of books had been found, evacuated by the RSHA.2

  Today, only a small part of the collections brought here after the war still remain. Bušek has tried to unravel what happened to the books. “It’s very difficult to know. There’s not a lot of documentation left from that time. We only have one small ledger from between 1945 and 1949,” he says. From Theresienstadt and other Nazi depots, some 190,000 books came to the museum. “Some books were handed back after the war, but it was not proper restitution, as we see it today. No one looked into who these books had belonged to or where they came from. There was neither staff to do it nor anywhere to put them. There were only two or three employees in the entire museum.”

  According to Bušek, the books were scattered in many directions; some were distributed among Jewish congregations in Czechoslovakia while others were sent to Israel. “There’s nothing to suggest that the books were checked. Most of the books were still in the crates the Nazis had packed them into. I believe they just picked a crate and gave it away without checking so very carefully what was inside. People came to the museum and asked, ‘Can we have fifty books?’ and then they got what they wanted.” Many were also taken over by Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR), which had been set up to share out plundered Jewish property in Jewish communities. The greater part of what remained of the Ghettobücherei in Theresienstadt was distributed in this way.3

  One of the more significant projects, which would later become part of Israel’s National Library, was first conceived by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was a politically Zionist “rescue project” that, in the prevailing mood during the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, attempted to bring as much as possible of Europe’s Jewish cultural legacy to Israel, where hundreds of thousands of survivors immigrated.4 At the end of 1946, the chief librarian at the Hebrew University, Hugo Bergmann, paid a visit with Otto Muneles to the RSHA’s depot in Niemes. They estimated that there were 650,000 books at the castle.

  “Some of them are Jewish; others are books of all different kinds. I saw Catholic books from monasteries, theosophist books, socialist books, etc. . . . In the attic of the castle I found a Dutch archive that I could not identify, flung on the floor. There were also newspapers in Yiddish, bound or packed into cardboard boxes. They were from YIVO, Vilnius,” wrote Bergmann in his report.5 He brought between forty thousand and seventy thousand Jewish books from Czechoslovakia back to Israel. The figure is uncertain, as many boxes were also smuggled out by Bergmann, who had covertly hidden valuable manuscripts inside.6

  Books at the Jewish Museum in Prague that still bear the markings of the Talmudkommando in Theresienstadt

  That so many books left Czechoslovakia in the first few years after the war was attributable to the support of the museum and the Jewish congregation. The Czech government, on the other hand, had taken a significantly more restrictive approach to the idea of returning plundered goods: “The Czech government generally has a negative attitude towards the question of restitution and [has] in certain instances labeled the desire of persons or organizations for the return of their property as ‘Fascist,’ ‘bourgeois,’ or whatever is the appropriate term at that particular time,” wrote one American observer.7 Private individuals had a more difficult time than anyone else in reclaiming their books. There is only one documented case of books in postwar Czechoslovakia being returned to a family.8

  One collection that would largely remain in Prague were the sixty thousand books from RSHA Section VII’s Hebrew section, on which the Talmudkommando had been working. Michal Bušek does not yet know how many books from this collection are still in the Jewish Museum library. “It may be about thirty thousand books, but we don’t know for sure. We’re in the process of cataloging them now. It does seem that Otto Muneles, after the war, separated these books from the others in the collection so they could remain in Prague.” But Bušek and his colleagues have also found books in the collection that were plundered from all over Europe. “Mostly they come from Jewish congregations in Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and other cities. We have found over 3,800 books that can be traced back to Vienna, both from congregations and private individuals,” Bušek tells me as he picks out a couple of books from his cart and shows me a stamp from Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, with an ex libris indicating that the book was donated by Salo Cohn, who led Vienna’s Jewish congregation until the early 1900s.

  Bušek then shows me into the library’s reading room. The valuable historical collection is kept in a glassed-in, locked annex to the side. Thick volumes bound in leather and gray vellum are handled with white cotton gloves. Bušek fetches one of the books that I have asked for—a book from Amsterdam. He places the slim volume on the white reading table, its cover so heavily marbled that it brings to mind one of August Strindberg’s expressionistic motifs of the sea. The title of the book is Der Mediciner Maimonides im Kampfe mit dem Theologen—a study of the medieval philosopher Maimonides and his advocacy of secular research.

  On the inside of the cover is an ex libris. It looks as if someone could have glued it in yesterday, although it must be close to a hundred years old. It shows an illustration against a white background, a stag and a lion rearing up on either side of a Star of David. Beneath, a name is written: Sigmund Seeligmann. The symbol is very likely a reference to a line from the Mishnah, the Jewish redaction of oral traditions: “Be swift as a gazelle and strong as a lion to do the will of God in Heaven.”9

  On the spine is a glued-on label marked “Jb 812,” placed there by the Talmudkommando. Maybe it was even glued on by Isaac Leo Seeligmann himself, thus labeling one of his father’s books. Bušek shows me a biography of the Sephardic religious philosopher Uriel da Costa, who fled the persecutions in Portugal in 1617 and settled in the Netherlands. The book has a personal dedication to Sigmund Seeligmann from its author, the Portuguese historian Artur de Magalhães Basto. Sigmund’s own signature is written inside a third book, a German translation of the Koran.

  The Seeligmann collection, plundered in Amsterdam by the ERR, was divided up among several of the RSHA’s depots. Apart from the books in Theresienstadt, other parts of the collection were found at various castles, including Schloss Niemes. Hugo Bergmann took about two thousand books from Seeligmann’s collection to Israel, while a smaller proportion remained at the Jewish Museum in Prague. Bušek has been able to identify about sixty of Seeligmann’s books here. But the whereabouts of the greater part of the collection, which, before the war, was estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 books, have never been established. Perhaps the collection was scattered in depots all over the Nazi German Reich, or books may have been discarded during the war, or destroyed in bombing raids in Berlin.

  Isaac Leo Seeligmann survived Theresienstadt and returned to Amsterdam in 1945. If he ever made any attempt to recover his books from Czechoslovakia, this would quickly have been ruled out by the establishment of the Iron Curtain. Especially as Czechoslovakia played a central part in the events that followed.

  Edvard Beneš, the president, had tried to position his nation as a bridge between East and West—Czechoslovakia being a free republic. It was a political project that soon collapsed. The young republic was troubled by political ins
tability, actively encouraged by the Soviet-backed Communist Party, which had a parliamentary majority. In 1947, Czechoslovakia accepted Marshall Plan assistance from the United States—financial support for reconstruction. However, pressure from the Kremlin forced the leadership to reverse this decision. Six months later, in early 1948, the Communists seized power in a coup backed by Moscow. Not long afterward, the Jewish Museum and its collections were nationalized.

  “After that, basically all restitution was stopped,” explains Bušek. The Communists could not entirely shut down the Jewish Museum, because it was so well known, but both research and exhibitions were limited to an absolute minimum. The museum placed a great deal of focus on Theresienstadt. But in the Communist narrative, this was a prisoner-of-war camp, not a camp for Jews. The Communists also chose to dispose of parts of the Jewish collections, including valuable Torah scrolls that were sold to the West. “These collections did not mean anything to them. The government needed money, they needed dollars, so they decided to sell them.” The Jewish library was transformed into what was effectively a wholly isolated institution, whose activities were carefully monitored by the regime. Both visitors and loans were registered. “Very few people came here. Researchers were afraid of visiting the library,” explains Bušek.

  In spite of the dismal circumstances, Otto Muneles, who had lost his entire family in the Holocaust, continued his work as head of the library until his death in the 1960s. He would spend almost twenty years trying to bring some order to the Jewish collection. Those who knew him have spoken of how he was absolutely absorbed in this work, as if these scattered, plundered books had the capacity to console him in some way: “It was like seeing a ghost wandering through these rooms filled with books, without anyone to read or study them . . . and still Dr. Muneles cherished a dream of an enormous library that would serve as a monument to the Jews who were once here, yet now no more.”10

  An ex libris from one of the books in the collection of Sigmund Seeligmann of Amsterdam. During the war, the book was moved to Theresienstadt and later ended up at the Jewish Museum in Prague, where it remains today.

  • • •

  After the war, when the Czech authorities inspected the plundered collections at the SS castles in Czechoslovakia, a good deal of material had already disappeared, including the large archive taken from the French secret service, hidden by the Gestapo in Schloss Oberliebich, near Česká Lípa. In fact, the depot had already been found by the Red Army intelligence organ SMERSH as early as May 1945. Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Soviet security service NKVD, had secretly sent archivists from Moscow to confiscate the archive, and in the summer twenty-eight railroad cars filled with archive materials were dispatched to Moscow, where they would form the foundation of a new, secret archive: Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Osobyi Arkhiv (TsGOA). This, Stalin’s special archive for trophy documents, was filled with enormous amounts of documentation confiscated from a variety of Nazi depots in Germany and Eastern Europe.11

  In February 1945, when the Red Army marched into Germany, Joseph Stalin had signed a top secret order that led to the establishment of the Special Committee for War Reparations. Admittedly Stalin had already in 1943 signed an agreement with the Western Allies that prohibited the plunder of cultural objects—this agreement, however, was not honored.

  This new committee, despite the seeming innocence of its name, kicked off a plundering operation that in its scope rivaled that of the Nazis. Stalin’s approach was that Germany must pay in kind for the enormous destruction in the Soviet Union, by a corresponding amount of thieving by the Soviets. To avoid disrupting relations with the Western Allies, the operation was kept secret.

  The units carrying out the plundering, known as trophy brigades, were essentially not unlike their German counterparts. The units consisted of Soviet archivists, librarians, scientists, and other experts. Cultural artifacts, such as works of art, archives, and books, were only a small portion of what was stolen. The dedicated government department that organized the plundering calculated that in 1945 alone, some 400,000 railroad cars of plundered goods were sent to the Soviet Union. Some of this was also reclaimed Soviet property. A list of goods sent from Germany to the Ukraine in 1945 testifies to the diversity of the cargo: 11 railroad cars of laboratory instruments, 123 vehicles, 2.5 tons of scientific books, 75 paintings from Dresden’s art museum, 12 tons of plates from the porcelain manufacturer August Wellner & Söhne; 46 railroad cars loaded with two disassembled printing presses; and 27 cars filled with the parts of a factory to manufacture photographic paper.12

  There was also widespread plundering—to some extent officially sanctioned—by soldiers, officers, and generals in the Red Army. Soldiers had the opportunity of repeatedly sending home packages of stolen goods. The busiest robbers tended to be the high-ranking officers and generals. Stalin’s top general, Georgy Zhukov, filled several trains with his war loot. This made Stalin’s war hero immensely rich, which Stalin later used against him to get rid of him.

  However, it was the trophy brigades that accounted for the more organized plundering, and units were sent to the castles of Central Europe to hunt for trophies. The castles were emptied of furniture, art, statues, pianos, porcelain, and any other furnishings that could be transported. There were also books. When it came to book confiscation there were special library units within the trophy brigades, which visited hundreds of libraries in Germany and Poland and also the book depots that the ERR and the RSHA had established when evacuating their book holdings to the east. The book plundering, organized by a group of representatives from larger libraries in the Soviet Union, was led by Margarita Rudomino, superintendent of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow.

  In the spring of 1946, Rudomino mentions in a report that between four thousand and five thousand crates of books had been placed in storage in Mysłowice, Poland. This was probably the main book holdings of the ERR from Ratibor, which lay only thirty-seven miles east of there. Whether these books had been evacuated by the ERR at the closing stages of the war or by the Red Army in the spring of 1945 is not specified.13

  In Pless, where the ERR’s employees escaped enemy fire from the front, a unit of the Fourth Ukrainian Front had seized about ten railroad cars loaded with books, journals, and archives. Some 150,000 books and 100,000 documents were found inside. The renowned library of Schloss Pless, with 100,000 volumes, was also packed up and removed while they were at it.

  A large part of the ERR’s collections found by the trophy brigades had originally come from Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and other places in the Soviet Union. But there were also collections from the West, including the émigré libraries in Paris that had been integrated into the Ostbücherei. In July 1945 the Red Army had already stated in a report that the Turgenev Library from Paris had been found in Mysłowice. There was “an estimated 1,200,000 volumes in Russian and foreign languages” there.14 The Turgenev Library was not classed as a trophy library, because it was “Russian” and thereby regarded as Soviet property.

  There seems not to have been any particular order in the Mysłowice depot either—thousands of crates had been stored haphazardly. According to one member of the trophy brigades, a part of the collection was plundered by soldiers. Sometimes “people took what they wanted,” wrote Rudomino in a report. This was how many older, valuable books and manuscripts went missing.15

  In some locations where depots had been opened up, the collections had been destroyed by soldiers before the trophy brigades could get to them: “The manor house had been occupied by Polish frontline troops and the crates opened. Many of the books lay in the courtyard, wet with rain; there were no guards; many of the books were ruined, damaged, burned.”16

  A more organized form of dispersal of these collections would follow once the books had been shipped eastward. In the autumn of 1945, forty-five railroad cars moved around one million books from Mysłowice to Minsk. In addition to Mysłowice, the tr
ophy brigades had tracked down other collection points in Poland, from which around three million books were sent to the Soviet Union. In addition, thousands of shelf-yards of archive material was sent to Stalin’s archive in Moscow, including some from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and the various archives of the Rothschild family.17

  The trophy brigades would also confiscate many of the finest German collections that ended up behind Soviet lines, including libraries such as Preussische Staatsbibliothek, Berliner Stadtbibliothek, Breslau’s university library, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s court library. From Berlin, Dresden, and Breslau more than a hundred railroad cars of books were removed. Several hundred German libraries were emptied.18

  The Lenin Library in Moscow ended up as the largest single recipient of trophy books, almost two million all told. The most valuable books that had been confiscated in Germany—medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and a Gutenberg Bible—were sent by air in a number of special deliveries to Moscow.

  After the war, the book units of the trophy brigades are estimated to have sent back between 10 million and 11 million books. But this would not cover all the books that were taken, as books were also plundered by other trophy units more focused on seizing, for instance, scientific equipment—which also included libraries and archives from schools, laboratories, universities, institutes, and other research organs. Trophy brigades that were stealing art also took museum libraries. In addition, there were large numbers of books stolen by Red Army soldiers.

  The historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted writes that the Soviet trophy brigades usually made no distinction between books plundered from German libraries and those that were being plundered a second time and had earlier been stolen by various Nazi organizations from occupied territories.

  Unfortunately, the books were affected by problems similar to those that had plagued other areas of the Soviet trophy operation. Many of the factories, machines, instruments, tools, and scientific apparatus that had been taken to the Soviet Union would end up never being used. The lack of skilled personnel, an inability to understand instruction manuals or a lack of the same, incompatible standards, and other logistical, technical, and practical problems often made the equipment unusable. And the lack of suitable storage meant that millions of trophy books were left in depositories in the Soviet Union. Cities such as Kiev, Minsk, and Leningrad had suffered large-scale destruction. In central Minsk only a few buildings were still standing, but almost half a million books were taken to this city of ruins. In Moscow, several million German books were stored and left untouched in an abandoned church in Uzkoye, southwest of the city.19 In other cases the books were in such poor condition that they were not very useful. For instance, the science academy in Tbilisi received about 100,000 rain-damaged German trophy books.