The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  In his testimony, Sutzkever speaks of the extermination of Jewish Vilnius, and how he remained in the ghetto from the first to the last days. He talked about his mother. How one day she disappeared. How he looked for her in her apartment but only found an open prayer book on the table and an undrunk cup of tea.

  Later he found out what had happened to her, when the Nazis in December 1941 had given a “gift” to the Jews. Carts filled with old shoes were rolled into the ghetto.52 Not long after, Sutzkever wrote a poem entitled “A Vogn Shikh” (A Wagon of Shoes):

  The wheels are turning, turning—

  What are they bringing there?

  They are bringing me a cartload

  Of quivering footwear.

  A cartload like a wedding

  In the evening glow,

  The shoes—in heaps, dancing,

  Like people at a ball.

  Is it a wedding, a holiday

  Or have I been misled?

  I know these shoes at a glance,

  And look at them with dread.

  The heels are tapping

  “Where to, where to, what in?”

  “From the old Vilna streets

  They ship us to Berlin.”

  I need not ask whose,

  But my heart is rent:

  Oh tell me shoes the truth

  Where were the feet sent?

  The feet of those boots

  With buttons like dew.

  The child of those slippers

  The woman of that shoe

  And children’s shoes everywhere—

  Why don’t I see a child?

  Why are the bridal shoes there

  Not worn by the bride?

  Among the children’s worn-out boots

  My mother’s shoes so fair!

  Sabbath was the only day

  She donned this footwear.

  And the heels are tapping

  “Where to, where to, what in?”

  “From the old Vilna streets

  They ship us to Berlin.”

  • • •

  In the dock sat Alfred Rosenberg. A decade earlier, here in Nuremberg, he had received the Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft, the Nazi equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The dedication had been as follows: “Because he helped establish and stabilize the National Socialist world picture both scientifically and intuitively.” Time spent in a cell at Nuremberg Prison had not brought about any conversion or outbursts of remorse, but it had given him the possibility of reflecting on what had gone wrong, as he saw it. Apart from the ideological corruption of the leadership around Adolf Hitler, Rosenberg felt that the so-called Führer cult had caused the downfall of the Third Reich. The National Socialist movement had rested too squarely on one man’s shoulders. These were thoughts he had entertained before, but they were dangerous if articulated.53 To Rosenberg, National Socialism had always been bigger than Adolf Hitler, and his vision for Hohe Schule had been about laying down intellectual and ideological foundations that could stabilize the movement for the future. Rosenberg’s analysis was probably true to a certain degree, but also naive and idealistic—without the “Führer cult” the regime would most likely have imploded on itself. Many more people followed Hitler than the dogmas.

  Rosenberg “has always lived in a world of unreal philosophy. He is completely unable to organise his present very real situation and constantly seeks to escape in aimless speech,” stated D. M. Kelly, one of the psychologists who examined Rosenberg during his time in prison.54

  Rosenberg’s lawyer, Ralph Thomas, who tried to get him to admit his guilt and reject his own ideological ideas during the trial, never had any chance. Rosenberg was no Albert Speer, but he did not fall to pieces either as Ribbentrop or Kaltenbrunner had done. Instead, he behaved coldly. Unlike his codefendants, he was not considered likely to attempt suicide: “No evidence of depression or suicidal preoccupation. Mood was entirely appropriate,” wrote William Harold Dunn, who conducted a medical and psychological evaluation of Rosenberg.55 “He gave the impression of clinging to his own theories in a fanatical and unyielding fashion and to have been little influenced by the unfolding during the trial of the cruelties and crimes of the party.”56

  When a film from the concentration camps was shown during the trial, Rosenberg looked away and refused to watch. He spent his time in the cell working on his memoirs, where he fixed on the idea that Germany was the victim of a Jewish conspiracy—which had now won. His own struggle had only been a defense against this world conspiracy. Rosenberg did not admit to any guilt. He did not feel that loyalty to his ideology could be a crime: “National Socialism was a European answer to the question of our century. It was the noblest idea to which a German could devote his powers,” he wrote in his cell.57

  Although Rosenberg had not in the same way as Himmler, Göring, Heydrich, and other Nazi leaders been directly involved in the planning of the war or the Holocaust, he was too entangled in his own role as chief ideologue to escape the inevitable verdict. The anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the racial ideology that Rosenberg had been preaching for decades had contributed to events. But what chiefly led to his conviction was his position as Reichsminister für die besetzten Ostgebiete. While it was conceded that Rosenberg had protested about heavy-handed action, at the same time he had not done anything to stop it, and he stayed at his post until the end, which was mentioned in the summation during the final proceedings on October 1, 1946.

  “Rosenberg’s real crime was not that he acted as a weak man, but that he had written and spoken like a strong man,” stated one historian.58 Rosenberg was found guilty on all four counts. He was sentenced to death.

  His henchmen got away with considerably more leniency—the Nazi researchers who plundered the world around them and helped build Rosenberg’s ideological cathedral. Most were able to go back to academic life or other careers. Wilhelm Grau, who had led the Frankfurt institute in the first years, would end up working in the publishing business, and in the 1950s became the director of a printing company. His successor, Klaus Schickert, became the managing director of a company in Cologne. Gerd Wunder, who led the research at Ratibor, rebranded himself after the war as a “social historian.” Instead of titles like Racial Questions and Jewry he went on to publish books such as South America and Europe’s Historical Relations.

  Some of the researchers became more high-profile than others, such as the historian Hermann Kellenbenz. After the war he was active for a time at Harvard University in the United States and later became an internationally respected economic historian. He continued publishing studies on the economic affairs of the Sephardic Jews, except with the ideology washed off.

  Johannes Pohl, the “Jewish expert” of the Frankfurt institute and a leading looter, worked after the war at Franz Steiner Verlag, a respectable German scientific publisher, and judging by his writings in Catholic journals, he seems to have reverted to his earlier faith. Pohl’s detailed reports from the various plundering fronts, where he listed what had been “secured,” were used as evidence against Alfred Rosenberg in the Nuremberg trials. But Pohl himself was never prosecuted.59

  Two weeks after being sentenced, in the early hours of October 16, 1946, Rosenberg was led from his cell into the inner courtyard of the prison. The ten war criminals were taken out one after another to the place of execution. The only one to avoid punishment was Hermann Göring, who, just two hours before his execution, bit into a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled in. After the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the RSHA leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the general field marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief ideologue’s turn came.

  “Rosenberg was dull and sunken-cheeked as he looked around the court. His complexion was pasty-brown, but he did not appear nervous and walked with a steady step to and up the gallows. Apart from giving his name and reply
ing ‘no’ to a question as to whether he had anything to say, he did not utter a word. Despite his avowed atheism he was accompanied by a Protestant chaplain who followed him to the gallows and stood beside him praying. Rosenberg looked at the chaplain once, expressionless. Ninety seconds after, he was swinging from the end of a hangman’s rope. His was the swiftest execution of the ten,” wrote the American journalist Howard K. Smith, who covered the executions.60

  With the others, Alfred Rosenberg’s body was taken to Munich, where they were all cremated in Ostfriedhof cemetery. That same night, under cover of darkness, the ashes of the executed men were emptied into the river Isar.

  [ 15 ]

  A BOOK FINDS ITS WAY HOME

  Berlin–Cannock

  Few cities are as gray as Berlin in March. The last time I was on Breite Strasse, a green alley of trees obscured the fact that this was the ugly side of Museumsinsel. The southern part of the island does not even go by the same name, it is simply called Spreeinsel. Sebastian Finsterwalder stubs out his cigarette outside the door of Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek.

  More than six months have gone by since I started my journey here. A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from Finsterwalder. Something had turned up.

  On the way up to his office, Finsterwalder tells me that other things are happening in the library, which is undergoing great change. Not only are the books being digitized, now also some of the librarians are going to be replaced by robots. The cataloging will be taken over by an external company that uses machines to do the job. It’s cheaper. But many members of staff have to be laid off, says Finsterwalder, who is active in the union.

  The restitution project at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek will go on. But no one knows for how long. Years of work lie ahead before Finsterwalder and his colleagues can identify the plundered books in the collection.

  “We don’t know how long we’ve got. Our boss still talks about this as a project that will one day come to an end. Usually, restitution investigations in Germany only carry on for a limited period of two or three years. But this is not something that can be completed in the short run. It’s a work over generations. And everyone knows it.”

  The office is unchanged, except that his colleague Detlef Bockenkamm is not there. He’s in the hospital. “He broke his hip in an accident,” Finsterwalder tells me. For his own part, he is still struggling on, is in the process of writing a new study, and has built a Web page to publish material that he and his colleagues have dug up from the archives. Among other things, how the library in 1943 made a bid to get its hands on some forty thousand books plundered from homes belonging to Berlin’s deported Jews.

  “It says here quite clearly that the money paid for the books would go toward the ‘Solution for the Jewish Question.’ The library was well aware of what the money would be used for,” Finsterwalder says, and shows me the letter.

  On the shelf along the wall, where volumes with bookplates from a variety of collections have been arranged, a few new names and piles of books have been added. My attention is immediately caught by a book with the signature “R. Wallenberg.” Finsterwalder does not know how the book has ended up in the library, nor who “R. Wallenberg” might be, but he does know that the book is stolen. After comparing the signature with that of the missing Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, we are able to confirm that this is another Wallenberg.

  From a white paper box on his desk Finsterwalder picks up another find in the collection that he is currently investigating. Carefully he opens the book, and I see that the pages have been written in longhand—large, beautiful, intricate letters in ink on thick brown paper. Its origins are revealed by a stamped mark of three French lilies. “This is a parish register from the little congregation of Verpel. It’s recorded here who was married, or baptized, between 1751 and 1771. It came to the library as a gift in 1945 but we don’t really know how. It clearly doesn’t belong here. It was stolen by someone during the war,” he explains. Verpel lies in Champagne-Ardenne in northeast France, near the Belgian border. In 2010, there were eighty-five people living there.

  It is very likely that the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek owns more plundered books drawn from scattered origins than any other library in Germany—and possibly in the whole of Europe. Apart from the library having bought whole batches of books from the Nazis, stolen from thousands of Jewish homes, after the war it took custody of books that were collected at 130 different places in Berlin—from individual Nazi officials, institutes, public authorities, and several Nazi libraries including Section VII’s book depot on Eisenacher Strasse, where Jewish slave workers had sorted and packed the books. How many books still remained in the bombed ruins of what was previously the Freemasons’ lodge is not known by anyone. All that can be said is that some of them did end up here. Then there were many plundered books after the war that were acquired in bulk from booksellers or as “gifts.” Some of the book depots to which the library evacuated its collections would also remain untouched for decades. Finsterwalder explains that tens of thousands of the library’s books were taken to a barn outside Berlin, where they stayed for forty years.

  It was from these plundered, scattered collections that the library’s predecessor, Berliner Stadtbibliothek, rebuilt its collection after the war—partly to fill the gaps caused by bombing raids, but also because the trophy brigades sent a large part of the original collection to the Soviet Union. Finsterwalder regards this part of the collection as irretrievably lost. He believes it is more important for the library to face up to its own history. Finding the owners of approximately a quarter of a million plundered books that are found in this building is a detective’s task, which, as yet, no cataloging robot in the world could accomplish.

  What this is about is finding the books that were once a part of libraries repeatedly divided up, scattered, sorted, and weeded. Even collections that were blown up, in a literal sense. “We have many books with traces of artillery shrapnel in them,” says Finsterwalder.

  It is about libraries fragmented to their smallest possible parts. There are books here from thousands of libraries, but often just a single book or a few copies from each collection. These fragments of what was once an integral library turn my thoughts to the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki. The way in which the broken gravestones were used as masonry in the walls of the town, and became a part of it. In the same way, the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek has been built using shards and ruins. The foundations are mainly unseen, but like a low slate wall behind a dirty moped garage, or a forgotten ex libris on a flyleaf, they offer a narrative about how these parts were once part of something or someone.

  Boxes of archive material from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, repatriated from what was once Stalin’s secret archive in Moscow. The existence of enormous numbers of books and archives in Russia was revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  The plunder was followed by destruction, both of a deliberate kind and as a consequence of war. Books disappeared into the grinders of paper mills, and they were blown up and torched. Others simply rotted away in forgotten depots, barns, and flooded cellars. But a greater, immeasurable destruction took place as a consequence of dispersal. Even if some scattered books still exist on the shelves of other libraries here and there, they have lost their context. They were a part of libraries that had a value in their own right—collections in which the parts became a greater whole.

  Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short commen
ts. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator’s world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed.

  But they are also fragments of individuals. The last time I came here, the librarian Detlef Bockenkamm, who was the one that uncovered the truth about this library, told me something that I could never quite let go of during my travels. The names he found in these forgotten books always gave the same answer: “Every time the trail led to Auschwitz.” It is a disturbing insight into how this is not just a library, but also a place of remembrance of those who were rarely given a grave. In some cases, the books are the only things these people have left behind.

  Most of the books are mute; they do not say a great deal about their owners. At best, a fragment, a note, possibly a name. Sometimes the name is too common and the victims too many. All Finsterwalder and his colleagues can do is enter the details into the database and wait. Thousands of books wait there, all searchable, like a net waiting for someone, somewhere, to be caught. From time to time an e-mail comes and a book is opened.

  A book whose trail went cold in Auschwitz long ago lies on the table in front of me. A small olive-green book faintly embossed in gold: a scythe in front of a wheat sheaf. It was already on the shelf behind Finsterwalder’s desk when I was last here. The title of the book is Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft (Law, State and Society). It was written by the conservative politician Georg von Hertling, who was the chancellor of Bavaria in the turbulent period at the end of the First World War. Inside the cover, on a flyleaf, is a simply fashioned ex libris, creating a frame around a name: Richard Kobrak. In the top-right corner of the title page, someone—most likely Kobrak himself—has written the name in pencil. As with many other books here at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, it is difficult to say where this book came from.