When one thinks of Nazis and books, images of suppression of speech, books burning on bonfires and chanting Hitler Youth come to mind.
The idea that Nazis would care for, seek out and collect books by Jewish authors seems antithetical to their ideology and everything we have come to know about them.
This is why Anders Rydell’s The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance is at once so surprising and important.
Interspersed with a series of library visits throughout Europe, Rydell tells the fascinating story of the systematic Nazi plunder of millions of books not for burning, but to fill fascist libraries meant to study the behavior, ideas and methods of the so-called “enemy”.
A number of excellent books have been written recently on the quest to save great art from destruction in the midst of both Nazi theft and Allied bombardment. The Monuments Men and Saving Italy are two recent books on the topic that have helped the story of the heroic efforts to save art for future generations become better known. Rydell’s book does the same for millions of books during the same time period, from the common to the highly coveted.
Along with tracing the fates of a million books, Rydell tells us the fascinating story of the internal bickering within the Nazi Party between propagandist Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question and Himmler’s Reich’s Main Security Office Library as they fought over plundered, subversive volumes. This rabid theft of priceless tomes was intended for re-education purposes and as such, seen as essential to the “security” of the Third Reich by Himmler. For Rosenberg it was more an attempt at building a collection up for the “1,000 Year Reich”, to record the supposed depravity and decline before its rescue of “civilization”.
Visiting libraries in Germany and throughout Europe, Rydell finds contemporary librarians who are trying to remove these books from the general collections. They do this by using identification markers like personal bookplates or stamps indicating the book was once in Rosenberg or Himmler’s library. The goal is to try, against all odds, to reunite these books with the descendants or existing family of the original owners, many of who died in the gas chambers.
Rydell himself is on a journey to return a single book, one out of hundreds of thousands of orphans. He races against time to deliver it by hand to the descendants of a victim of the Holocaust as he unravels this remarkable story.
WW2 Reads gives “The Book Thieves” 5 of 5 stars! Get it now.
You May Also Like…
