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  • The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell
  • H. R. Woudhuysen (bio)
Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, trans. Henning Koch (New York: Viking, 2017), 368 pp.

The books destroyed and plundered by the Nazis across Europe and in Russia can be counted individually, by the tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions; by tons, by numbers of crates, of truckloads and of railway trucks, by shelf-yards, and even by potato sacks. This pillaging across the continent, "the most extensive theft of books in the world," was driven not simply by "a fanatical obsession to collect" books (as the Nazis collected works of art) but by the totalitarian urge to control people's lives, memories, and thoughts, to own their past, and "to capture the right to write their history." In addition, the Nazis believed that the looted libraries and archives "might provide materials backing up the theory of Jewish world conspiracy." Equally, the Third Reich, the argument went, had to know more about Bolshevism in order to be able successfully to fight it. Libraries contained knowledge and useful intelligence for the Reich's future military, economic, and social plans.

The main Nazi organizations responsible for the thefts (the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg [ERR] and the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt [RSHA]) competed with each other to loot thousands of libraries in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Russia, and elsewhere. They stole not just books, manuscripts, archives, letters, diaries, maps, music, scrolls, photographs, and recordings, but also the inventories, registers, and catalogs that gave access to them as well. Libraries were stolen and broken up; books from collections were dispersed and lost their context. The Nazis sought out materials relating to Freemasonry, the occult, socialism and communism, the churches, and, of course, the Jews. So large and extensive were the thefts that, especially in relation to Hebrew and Yiddish items, the aspiration to achieve what the Völkisher Beobachter called "Jewish studies without Jews" was frustrated; in places, Jews found themselves employed to catalog and arrange material they knew had been [End Page 322] stolen. The task the Nazis set themselves overwhelmed them, and at the Frankfurt Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage "considerably more time and effort during the war years" was devoted "to the transportation, storage, sorting, and cataloging of books than to any actual research." Vast numbers of books were also burned, pulped, or simply left to rot.

As the war progressed, the Allies, especially the Soviets, did their own plundering of the plundered material, and so the "Race to Return a Literary Inheritance" that Anders Rydell seeks to describe resembles more accurately a long-deferred and much interrupted stroll. The complications of restitution are too formidable to permit an urgent sprint. Rydell organizes his material by visits to a series of places (Berlin, Weimar, Munich, Chiemsee, Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris, Rome, Thessaloniki, Vilnius, Theresienstadt, Ratibor-Frankfurt, Prague, Cannock) and of meetings with librarians and archivists. These culminate with the representative return of one stolen book to a descendant of its original owner. Rydell describes the history of some of the personal and institutional libraries that were plundered, explains how the Nazis organized the thefts, what they intended to do with the books, and how they planned to house them. He sketches in the political and military history behind the various stories, tells how the looted libraries came into being, and tries to explain the significance of some of the books themselves.

Rydell's project is ambitious and wide ranging, important and tragic. The way in which he has chosen to arrange the material sometimes makes it difficult to follow the larger narrative, but the index helps. This book will affect all of its readers, whether they are professional historians, book historians, or otherwise, and the translation from the Swedish by Henning Koch is easily readable and self-effacing.

H. R. Woudhuysen

H. R. Woudhuysen is the rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of...

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