The Road to Minsk for Western "Trophy" Books: Twice Plundered but Not Yet "Home from the War"

In the fall of 1945 an echelon of fifty-four freight cars arrived from Silesia in the war-torn Belarusian capital of Minsk bringing over 1 million library books. Half of them had been plundered from Belarusian libraries by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) during World War II, but the other half had been plundered by the ERR in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and ended the war in the ERR Silesia center in Ratibor (now Polish Racibórz). Many of those "twice-plundered" books are still in Minsk, some were forwarded to Moscow (only a handful of those returned to the West), some were destroyed by order of the censor, while many have been otherwise dispersed. Only half a century later can we begin to reconstruct their migration and identify the private libraries (mostly Jewish) from whence they came.