The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  “It’s fairly complicated. We found it a few years ago; it came to the library in about 1950,” says Finsterwalder, getting out a catalog in which about a thousand books have been cataloged. All come from the same source, a person by the name of Dombrowski. “It’s a curious collection of books. There are many plundered books here, but others that could not have been plundered, because they were printed after the war. We don’t have any certainty about the point of origin. Dombrowski sounds Polish, but it wasn’t a wholly unusual name in Germany. There was a Dombrowski with Gestapo connections; it may have been him.”

  The library started entering the books into the catalog in 1958. “That’s how we found most of these books. But it’s also curious that they gave this collection a catalog of its own. That was not how it was usually done,” Finsterwalder says, and turns the pages until he gets to book number 766—Richard Kobrak’s book. “These numbers are still in use today, so with the help of this catalog I could make my way through the shelves and find the books. Most of them were still here. I began looking through them, searching for owners’ marks. They came from many different collections that had been fragmented before and during the war. Then I photographed the books and put them in our public database. Kobrak’s book was one of them.”

  Some of the books that have been found in the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek come from well-known individuals and libraries. On the shelf are a few books belonging to the world-famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein, including a collection of sonnets with a personal dedication by the Brazilian poet Ronald de Carvalho. But most of the books here were the property of ordinary people.

  A search in various archives for Richard Kobrak’s name does not give away much information. In a genealogy register I find a few brief lines: “Dr. Richard Kobrak was born in 1890. During the war he was deported on Transport I/90 from Berlin to Theresienstadt 18/03/1943. Then deported on Transport Er from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz 16/10/1944. Dr. Kobrak lost his life in the Shoah.”1 Thanks to the hideous, dry scrupulousness of Nazi bureaucracy, we know more about the transportation numbers of the trains used to deport him than about Kobrak as a person. Mere numbers to designate a person among millions being transported to their deaths. Many times there is nothing else.

  The sheer number of plundered books in the collection make it impossible for Finsterwalder and his colleagues to go much deeper into it. “Sometimes we actively search for owners, but usually we just put them in the database and hope that someone will find them, if there are any descendants,” he says. But a month or so after my first visit to the library in June 2014, it suddenly received an e-mail. Someone had found book number 766, entered by Finsterwalder into the database. The message had been sent from the other side of the world, by a female scientist studying dengue fever in Hawaii. She was not a descendant herself, but she believed she knew who the book belonged to. She had married into another branch of the Kobrak family, that of a brother of Richard Kobrak who had emigrated from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. At the end of the year, Finsterwalder told me, another e-mail came from England from a woman by the name of Christine Ellse who described herself as a grandchild of Richard Kobrak.

  In a German database I find out a little more about Kobrak, namely that until 1933 he was a lawyer and civil servant at the city office in Berlin. He was married to Charlotte Kobrak, three years younger than he was. The couple had three children. Neither Richard nor Charlotte have a specific day on which they died. All we know is that they were on one of the last transports from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944.

  Richard Kobrak managed to get his three children out of Germany in 1939, including Christine Ellse’s father, Helmut Kobrak. However, once he got to England, he was deported to Australia as an “enemy alien.”

  It is likely that, much like hundreds of thousands of others in the autumn of 1944, they were taken at once to the gas chambers. But I can see that the couple’s three children, who were only teenagers when the war broke out, survived. But how?

  Finsterwalder slides the olive-green book into a brown padded envelope, with two copies of a contract. It is two pages long, and in it the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek transfers the book to the ownership of “the descendants of Dr. Richard Kobrak.”

  Recently the left-wing political party Die Linke and the environmental party Die Grünen proposed in the Bundestag that there should be better possibilities in Germany for the victims of Nazism to recover lost property, but Finsterwalder does not believe this will ever become a reality. “In Germany the attitude is that we have already paid our debt. Unfortunately, there is no political interest in tackling this question in a meaningful way.” In this regard, Sebastian Finsterwalder and Detlef Bockenkamm have an air of restitution activism about them. Despite limited resources and bureaucratic resistance, they continue digging up and exposing this graveyard of books.

  The question of restitution, and the media attention it has had since its reemergence in the 1990s, has primarily focused on spectacular cases of plundered art and the legal conflicts and return of works of art worth millions of dollars—for instance, the successful legal battle of Maria Altmann, a Holocaust survivor, to reclaim some of the artist Gustav Klimt’s greatest masterpieces from the Austrian state. In 2006, five paintings handed over in the same year were sold for $325 million. These cases have often involved dirty games between museums, governments, and profiteering lawyers at the expense of the legitimate demands of survivors and descendants. Above all, these cases, and the fantastic sums involved from time to time, have thrown a veil over the moral basis of the question of restitution. This has provided ammunition for the opponents of restitution, who have tried to lend credence to the suggestion that the entire process is actually fueled by greed. It has not been unusual for the voices calling for an end or “deadline” for restitution to be one and the same as those who carry some moral blame in these cases: art dealers, museums, and governments.

  In Sebastian Finsterwalder’s spartan office at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek we are far from these spectacular restitution cases, but much closer to the core of the whole issue of restitution. Here the return of property—several hundred cases since the process began a few years ago—proceeds largely without any attention at all. There are no headlines, no scandals, and no interest from well-remunerated law firms. In most cases the cost of the postage exceeds the value of the actual books being returned. It is a restitution process entirely liberated from the capital-driven art market. The value of these books resides in something else, which cannot be computed in monetary terms. As far as Finsterwalder and his colleagues are concerned, there is a moral obligation underlying their work, namely the return of something that was lost—book by book.

  “I’ve been asked by people in Israel why we go on with this small-scale, time-consuming work. Why don’t we just donate the books of Jewish families to the National Library in Israel? But if there is still a possibility of finding descendants or survivors, which there often is, I think we should hand the books back to them. I’m convinced this is the right way. After that, they can donate the books if they choose to, but that’s a decision I can’t make, and not some library in Israel either.”

  I pack the brown envelope with the olive-green notebook into my rucksack. I am overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility, which soon transforms itself into something else. A few days later when I board a plane in Berlin bound for Birmingham, England, the book is still stowed in my rucksack. I have hardly touched it. But several times these last few days I have opened the rucksack and peered into the brown envelope, to reassure myself that it is still there. Where it could possibly go I don’t know. Nor who would want to steal it. But the thought of its disappearance has left me unsettled. Admittedly the little olive-green book is not a treasure—if it was, it might in some ways have made things easier. Maybe then it could have been replaced if it was lost, but this book is irreplaceable.

  But books were not only r
otting away in barns outside Berlin. In October 1990, a Russian cultural journal, Literaturnaia gazeta, revealed that two and a half million German trophy books had been dumped and forgotten in a church in Uzkoye, outside Moscow. Several decades of damp, vermin, and a growing blanket of pigeon droppings had transformed the books into rotting pulp.2 The article caused a great deal of attention, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Germany. It was the first time that the extensive plunder of German collections had come into the public domain, largely as a consequence of glasnost, the policy of transparency and openness that Mikhail Gorbachev had launched in an attempt to modernize the Soviet system.

  Gorbachev’s reforms, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (innovation), ended up accelerating the collapse of the empire. Not least, glasnost contributed to the exposure of failings in the system and thereby undercut its legitimacy. This was also the first time that information had come to light of trophy plundering during the war, which until then had been classified. The postwar period had seen some of the collections returned, but only as a rule in the Eastern bloc. There had never been a question of restitution, especially not to the West and not of any materials that had ended up in Stalin’s secret archive.

  The successive opening up of the Soviet archives not only provided new insights into the Nazi plundering by means of millions of confiscated German documents, it also emerged that millions of books and thousands of shelf-yards of archive material, which for years had been assumed as lost in the war, were in actual fact still there on different sets of shelves in the Soviet Union.

  Even the tragic fate of the trophy books was revealed. Trophy books had been worn out, rotted away, or discarded. They had been subjected to extensive clean-outs by archivists, censors, and librarians—not entirely unlike the clean-outs of “degenerate literature” conducted in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Often, the same books had been selected by both sides, either bourgeois or decadent literature.3

  In the years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question of restitution of these trophy hoards was raised. A step toward this process was taken in 1992, when a conference was arranged for Russian and German libraries. Among the Russian delegates were some from the biggest recipients of foreign trophy books, including the Vserossiyskaya Gosudarstvennaya Biblioteka Inostrannoy Literatury im. M. I. Rudomino (VGBIL). In other words, the Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature. Rudomino, its superintendent during the war, had been in charge of the plunder of books in Germany. In the spirit of glasnost, the library made public a catalog of valuable books from the 1500s, which had been confiscated.4

  The conference led to the creation of a commission to investigate the return of old, valuable books. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Austria, and France, also opened negotiations with the new Russian Federation in an attempt to recover lost book and archive collections. Similar negotiations were set in motion with the now independent Ukraine and Belorussia, which had both received millions of trophy books.

  Several libraries, such as the VGBIL in Moscow, took a voluntary initiative, and before the 1992 conference, 604 books plundered by the Nazis had already been returned to the University of Amsterdam.5 The Netherlands, Belgium, and France took part in a collaborative process to identify and retake possession of lost archive material, which was assumed to be somewhere in Russia. The scale of the Russian archive plunder was revealed when a deal was struck with France for the return of 7,000 shelf-yards of material from Stalin’s secret archive in Moscow. Among other things, the material included archives of the French secret police and French Freemasons orders, but also private archives belonging to Léon Blum, Marc Bloch, and the French branch of the Rothschild family. The exchange came at a price. In addition to a cash sum of 3.5 million francs, Russian-related archives were also handed over by France.6

  Priceless historical documents from secret Russian archives also started surfacing. A messenger from President Boris Yeltsin handed over secret documents to Poland about the Katyn massacre during the war, when 22,000 Poles, including thousands of Polish officers, were executed by the Soviet security service, the NKVD.

  However, the optimism and high hopes, which for a few years in the early 1990s defined relations between East and West, would soon fall to the wayside. Although Russia’s President Yeltsin had entered into agreements on restitution with a number of affected countries, criticism of the president’s open-handed policies grew in the Duma.

  The resistance came principally from right-wing nationalists and Communists, both of whom actively rejected each and every instance of restitution. Before long the opponents held a majority in the Duma and the ongoing return of French archives was frozen in 1994. By this time some three-quarters of the haul had already been handed back to France, but several of the trucks that had been dispatched to Moscow had to come back empty. The large sum of money that France had paid, which was supposedly going to be used to microfilm the documents, was never received by the archive and must have disappeared en route.7 It was not the last time such things occurred.

  The opponents of restitution claimed that the treasures brought back to Russia by the trophy brigades had not been plundered but “liberated by the Soviet Army” and were therefore quite legally brought into the Soviet Union. The prevailing attitude was that there was no obligation for Russia to hand back anything. But this resistance was far from unanimous, and many academics, librarians, and above all the Yeltsin administration believed that some sort of restitution was needed in order to rebuild relations with the West. Yet Russian nationalists and the Communist Party firmly rejected such arguments and ran fierce campaigns against the restitution process. In Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, there were headlines such as “Will the Russian People Be Robbed One More Time?”8

  In other countries in the former Soviet Union, the approach to restitution of scattered trophy treasure seesawed between animosity, indifference, and a spirit of cooperation. Countries like Belorussia and Ukraine took a similar approach to that of Russia, while Georgia, in 1996, returned 96,000 trophy books to Germany, and Armenia followed, returning books to Germany as well.9

  A general thaw seemed imminent when Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996. One of the requirements of membership was that Russia must begin negotiations on restitution with other European countries. But the high expectations were soon dashed. Already in July of that same year, the Duma tried to push through a piece of legislation that would “nationalize” all trophy treasures and thereby make them impossible to hand back. Yeltsin, declaring that Russia’s international reputation was at stake, vetoed the attempt. However, the proposal was reintroduced in the Duma. One parliamentary representative declared that returning these treasures would be like “spitting on the graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens killed in the war.”10 Another ultranationalist representative complained about Yeltsin’s compliance toward the Germans, who were “Fascist villains then as now.”11 While the Soviet Union had folded, feelings about the Great Patriotic War were undiminished. Yeltsin’s veto was overturned in 1997, but the president refused for a whole year to sign the proposal into law. In 1998, the Russian Constitutional Court finally made Yeltsin sign off on the legislation. The new law not only stopped the restitution of art treasures to Western Europe, it also halted the restitution of large amounts of artifacts stolen from republics in the former Soviet bloc.

  Another aggravating circumstance was that Soviet archives were once again being closed off to researchers from the West, which made it almost impossible to trace the stolen treasures. Glasnost, the short era of openness, went back to a culture of secrecy that was much like the “old Soviet way.”

  While the Russian anti-restitution law effectively put a stop to an extensive return of trophy treasures, it was still possible to reclaim minor collections, even if this often proved both complicated and costly. It would also take diplomatic approaches, legal lo
opholes, and in some cases bribes pure and simple, with the requirement that one altogether avoided that politically sensitive word restitution. One early case of the sort of “return” that the Duma was willing to accept concerned the Liechtenstein archive. An agreement was reached in 1996 as a result of negotiations on the part of the princely family of Liechtenstein, whose archive was in Moscow. However, this was not a case of restitution, as the Duma saw it, but an exchange. The royal family, acting on a Russian prompt, had bought a valuable collection of documents on the subject of the Bolsheviks’ murder of the tsar and his family in 1918. The documents, which had remained hidden in a bank vault in Paris for seventy years, had recently surfaced at the auction house Sotheby’s. They went under the hammer for half a million dollars.

  The case was the beginning of a new phase in which “restitution” was substituted for “exchange.” Soon there would be more of such cases of bartering for archives and libraries. But it cannot be said that this sort of exchange was new; it was more of a reversion to the old Soviet system, where the regime exchanged materials such as letters or books in order to take possession of items it wanted—especially if these related to Lenin and Marx, for which almost any price would be paid. For instance, there is a case where the regime offered a painting by Wassily Kandinsky for an autograph by Lenin.

  In the new Russia, where nationalism had replaced Leninism, the imperial legacy had taken on central importance. The Russian position was that trophy treasures had not been plundered but liberated by the Red Army, and for this reason there should be compensation for anything returned. The director of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg commented to a British newspaper: “If these paintings had remained in Germany after 1945 they would have been hit by inheritance tax two or three times by now. It is obvious to me that Russia, as the custodian of these works, is more entitled to the treasures than Germany.”12