Nazi Book Theft
From Salon (May 28, 2017, Noah Charney)
Until the late 1930s, German children taught about rhinoceroses would have flipped their textbooks not to a photograph, but to a 1515 woodcut print by an artist who had never actually seen such a creature in the flesh. The artist, Albrecht Dürer, was the greatest in Germanic history, and the print is spectacular. It happens to be a pretty good impression of a rhino, but not one that was made by an eyewitness. A real rhino had been on display in Lisbon in 1515, brought there in 1513 from India. Dürer was sent a description and a sketch of that rhino by another artist, and from this he prepared his woodcut.
But while it is a wonderful artwork, it is not accurate and certainly not scientific. Dürer presented the animal covered in bony plates, as if it were wearing a natural suit of armor, complete with a throat protector and what looks like rivets linking together various “plates.” It is rhino as medieval knight. He also showed the rhino as scaled, like a lizard.
Enthusiasm for Dürer overrode the desire for scientific accuracy. Even when photographs of rhinos were available, even when one could see a real rhino at the zoo and recognize the inaccuracy of Dürer’s version, the print remained the exemplar of rhinoceros-ness in reference books for schoolchildren.
From Salon (May 28, 2017, Noah Charney)
Which brings me to Nazi book theft.
The scale of book theft during World War II is immense, far dwarfing the already boggling numbers of Nazi art theft. While some have estimated that 5 million art objects changed hands inappropriately during World War II, most of them stolen or appropriated by the Nazis, few have discussed the Nazi practice of looting books, rare and otherwise, from the libraries of conquered Europe.
The Book Thieves, a new book by Swedish journalist Anders Rydell, focuses on just this. Beyond the book burnings, book theft was engaged in on an unimaginable scale. In an interview with the European Review, Rydell explained that it “dwarfed the art looting,” with an estimated 100 million to 200 million books stolen during the war.
While it feels more logical to steal art (some exhibited as “degenerate,” other pieces sold to foreign collectors—including American and British ones—to finance the Nazi war effort, still others kept by avaricious Nazi high-ups for their personal delectation, and additional works intended for Hitler’s planned “super museum” at Linz) since it has an obvious value financially in terms of its sale, symbolically in terms of capturing the treasures of the vanquished and aesthetically, books are a rather different proposition.
From Salon (May 28, 2017, Noah Charney)
Sure, rare books and manuscripts can have a sale value rivaling artworks, but most of the books stolen by the Nazis were not financially valuable. The Nazi art theft bureau (Rosenberg) was originally founded to seize documents and archives that had a strategic value to the Third Reich, and only later began to consume artworks, too. And therein lies a clue.
Rydell’s analysis of why the Nazis took so many books reveals some chilling rationales. “The looting had mainly two purposes,” he said. “On the one hand, to ‘unarm’ their enemies by taking the weapons of thought — books, libraries, archives. In Poland, the Nazis even looted books from schools — in a Nazi-dominated East, Polish children didn’t have any need for higher education as, in the future, they would be reduced to slaves under the master race.” Kafka once said, “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” The Nazis aimed to disarm those they wished to see subdued by removing the weapons of thought.
From Salon (May 28, 2017, Noah Charney)
Rydell continued, noting that “the second goal was even more devious." He explained, "By looting the libraries and archives of their enemies, the Nazis tried to take control over the memory and history of the victims. Alfred Rosenberg, who founded the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, was afraid that, even if the Nazis won the war, future generations would judge them for their crimes.
Therefore, it was important to control the memory of Jews, not as a way to eradicate them from written memory, but to establish the Jews as an incarnation of evil for all future generations.”
Thus it was not for profit but for posterity and the ability to control it that the Nazis sought to wipe Europe’s libraries clean and to rewrite a version of history that best suited their spin.
This is where the example of Dürer’s rhinoceros becomes relevant. The German pre-Nazi government decided that it would rather have this print as exemplar of a species than an accurate picture of the real thing. It is a very Nazi sort of decision, choosing a leading Germanic artist for ideological reasons to include in books about facts, when the facts are not sufficiently self-promoting.
From Salon (May 28, 2017, Noah Charney)
If you can eliminate bodies of knowledge, the compendia housed in libraries of the pre-digital era, where access to physical tomes was required to look up facts, then you can rewrite fact as you see fit.
That was what Nazi book theft was about. The ability to manipulate history, and therefore program the thoughts of future generations, is far more valuable than the auction price of a painting.
But it requires a colossal-scale operation, sweeping libraries clean because “real” history books lurking here and there would be like time bombs. Future scholars might find them and question your tailored version of reality.
Thus it is not outrageous to see the Nazi attempt at wiping history clean by stripping Europe of its books as analogous to attempts to physically wipe Europe clean of what the Nazis considered “lesser” races.
Library of Congress—Anders Rydell
Nazi Looting of Books
There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves Too (NYTimes, Jan 15, 2019)
The hunt for the millions of books stolen by the Nazis during World War II has been pursued quietly and diligently for decades, but it has been largely ignored, even as the search for lost art drew headlines. The plundered volumes seldom carried the same glamour as the looted paintings, which were often masterpieces worth millions of dollars.
But recently, with little fanfare, the search for the books has intensified, driven by researchers in America and Europe who have developed a road map of sorts to track the stolen books, many of which are still hiding in plain sight on library shelves throughout Europe.
Their work has been aided by newly opened archives, the internet, and the growing number of European librarians who have made such searches a priority . . .
''People have looked away for so long,'' said Anders Rydell, author of The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, "but I don't think they can anymore.''
There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves Too (NYTimes, Jan 15, 2019)
Given the scope of the looting, the task ahead remains mountainous. In Berlin, for example, at the Central and Regional Library, almost a third of the 3.5 million books are suspected to have been looted by the Nazis, according to Sebastian Finsterwalder, a provenance researcher there.
''Most major German libraries have books stolen by the Nazis,'' he said. But researchers say there are signs they may be on the brink of making measurable progress in restitutions.
In the last 10 years, for example, libraries in Germany and Austria have returned about 30,000 books to 600 owners, heirs and institutions, according to researchers. In one instance in 2015, almost 700 books stolen from the library of Leopold Singer, an expert in the field of petroleum engineering, were returned to his heirs by the library of the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
''There's definitely progress, but slow progress,'' said Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, senior research associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University and one of the world's foremost experts on the libraries and archives stolen during World War II.
The numbers alone often do not do justice to what a single returned piece of Judaica, or even a more prosaic volume, can mean to a family.
There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves Too (NYTimes, Jan 15, 2019)
In Germany last year, the University of Potsdam library gave an important 16th-century volume back to the family of its owner, a man killed in a concentration camp in 1943. The book, written by a rabbi in 1564 and later looted, explains the fundamentals of the Torah's 613 commandments. The owner's grandson identified it from a list of looted works that had been posted online. Then he and his father, a Holocaust survivor, flew from Israel to Germany to retrieve it. ''It was quite an emotional experience for my father and myself,'' said the grandson . . .
Ms. Grimsted's work in tracking the lost volumes has advanced considerably since 1990, when she discovered 10 lists of items looted from libraries in France by . . . the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. The task force plundered more than 6,000 libraries and archives all over Europe but left behind the sort of detailed records that have proved invaluable in tracing what was stolen.
Hundreds of thousands of records from the task force and other sources have been posted online in recent years, part of an effort by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the World Jewish Restitution Organization and others to ease the path for researchers, libraries, museums, historians and families tracing the works.
There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves Too (NYTimes, Jan 15, 2019)
Ms. Grimsted's work has been central to the task, and her publication, ''Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder . . . is, among other things, an inventory of where the many documents can be found.
Though Rosenberg, who was hanged as a war criminal in 1946, was the major force behind the seizure of books, he had something of a competitor in Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, whose agents also collected books, particularly those associated with Freemasonry.
The Nazi targets were mainly the families, libraries and institutions of Jews but also included the Masons, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Slavs and critics of the Nazi regime. Though libraries were destroyed and some books were burned by the Nazis early on, they later came to transfer many of the works to libraries and to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question, which was established by the task force in Frankfurt in 1941.
''They hoped to utilize the books after the war was won to study their enemies and their culture so as to protect future Nazis from the Jews who were their enemies,'' Ms. Grimsted said.
There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves Too (NYTimes, Jan 15, 2019)
After the war, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit of the United States Army, better known as the ''Monuments Men'' and famed for the return of looted art, also saved millions of books. Its main book collection point, the Offenbach Archival Depot outside Frankfurt, was the former headquarters of IG Farben, a chemical company whose subsidiary had produced a poison gas used in the death camps. The Army unit processed nearly three million books and manuscripts, which were returned, mainly to their countries of origin. . . .
Document Forgery
Author's Note—Book of Lost Names
Then I read Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life by Sarah Kaminsky and A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II by Peter Grose
My agent, Holly Root, emailed me a New York Times article about the Nazi looting of books [by Milton Esterow]—and the fact that most major German libraries are still full of books stolen in the waning days of World War II.
And that brings me to The Book of Lost Names. Otto Kühn, the German librarian in the story, is fictional, but the work he’s doing is based in reality. In Berlin’s Central and Regional Library, for example, researchers estimate that nearly a third of the 3.5 million books were stolen by the Nazis, according to The New York Times. Researchers such as Sebastian Finsterwalder—a real-life Otto Kühn—and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University are working to reunite looted books with their owners, but it’s an uphill battle, especially now that the war is more than seventy-five years behind us. Sadly, few of the people who owned and cherished those books are still alive today.
If you’re interested in finding out more about looted books and the search for their rightful owners, pick up The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell.
Author's Note—Book of Lost Names
Lest you think that all forgers were male, there were plenty of women working in forgery bureaus, too, including Mireille Philip, Jacqueline Decourdemanche, and Gabrielle Barraud in the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and Suzie and Herta Schidlof, sisters who worked in Kaminsky’s Paris lab.
Many of the details that appear in The Book of Lost Names are based on real methods of forgery during World War II. Rosowsky, for example, often used the Journal Officiel to search for suitable false identities. Kaminsky, who had a chemistry background, like Rémy does in this book, stumbled upon the secret for erasing Waterman’s blue ink with lactic acid.
It was Gabrielle Barraud who came up with the idea for using a hand printing press to mass-produce official stamps. Rosowsky even makes a covert appearance in The Book of Lost Names; when Geneviève arrives in Aurignon, she mentions having worked for a man named Plunne in an area called the Plateau. Jean-Claude Plunne was, in fact, Rosowsky’s alias; Geneviève is talking about working for him.
Author's Note—Book of Lost Names
During the writing of this novel, my desk was piled high with real-life examples of the kinds of documents Eva, Rémy, and Geneviève would have relied upon and forged. I have dozens of tattered copies of the Journal Officiel from 1944; like the forgers in the book, I even plucked a few character names from the pages of the newspaper. I have an old French baptismal certificate from June 1940, complete with official stamps, and a German-issued Ausweis laissez-passer travel permit stamped in Paris in December 1940. Perhaps most important, I have the real-life, leather-bound Epitres et Evangiles, printed in 1732, upon which the titular Book of Lost Names is actually based. As Eva and Rémy encoded names and messages within its pages, I was using the real pages of the real book as a guide.
Kaminsky—Museum of Jewish Heritage
Adolfo Kaminsky, today credited with saving the lives of over 14,000 Jews, was an accomplished forger and photographer, and one of the lesser-known Jewish heroes of the Holocaust.
Kaminsky put his forgery skills to work for the French-Jewish resistance, specializing in the creation of identity documents. He developed many of the needed skills to work as a forger during his time spent removing stains in a dye shop. During the war, in his covert laboratory, Kaminsky worked tirelessly, often for days and nights at a time, making calculations and sacrifices that would save as many lives as he could.
An International Beginning
Kaminsky’s parents, Anna (née Kinoël) and Salomon Kaminsky, were Russian Jews who had each immigrated to Paris, where they met in 1916. However, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Kaminskys were considered suspicious “reds” in Paris and decided to take refuge in Argentina, where Adolfo Kaminsky was born on October 1, 1925.
The Kaminsky family returned to France in 1932 and it was in Paris that Adolfo Kaminsky finished his elementary school education and joined the workforce to help support his struggling family.
Kaminsky—Museum of Jewish Heritage
Kaminsky found a job at a dye shop, where he said he “discovered the magic of color.” Fascinated by the chemical processes behind stain removals, Kaminsky often experimented on his own, and took a side job as a chemist’s assistant at a dairy factory to learn more about the science. Kaminsky discovered at this factory that lactic acid worked well at dissolving Waterman blue ink, a trick that came in handy in his later work as a forger.
World War II, Internment, and Resistance
When the Nazis occupied France during World War II, the Kaminskys fled to the countryside and evaded capture by the Nazis for more than 2 years. Adolfo Kaminsky’s world shattered when his mother was murdered by the Nazis for warning her brother about an impending arrest by Nazi authorities. The rest of the family’s luck would soon run out, too: they were arrested on October 22, 1943 and transferred to Drancy, an internment camp located in a northeastern suburb of Paris that served as a transition point before the death camps.
By luck, the Kaminsky family was saved by intervention of the Argentine consulate; their Argentinian passports granted them passage out of Drancy. Even so, danger was always close, and they knew their passports could not protect them forever.
Kaminsky—Museum of Jewish Heritage
Seeing an opportunity to contribute to the Resistance with his scientific knowledge, Kaminsky joined “La Sixième,” a Jewish underground rescue network. With quill, ink, and stamps, Kaminsky forged identification and food ration cards for the French Resistance, replacing Jewish-sounding names with gentile-sounding ones. Kaminsky often worked for hours on end in a secret lab on these forged documents, at one point making over 900 documents within three days to save 300 Jewish children.
His work allowed many Jewish people to escape deportation to concentration camps, avoid arrest, and leave the country.
Later Life
After the war , Kaminsky’s skill and work were known and sought broadly in underground communities. Because of the nature of the work, he largely remained quiet and stayed out of the spotlight for fear of discovery. This way, he continued forging papers to support resistance fighters and anti-colonial groups in Algeria, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Santo Domingo, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, and more.
Kaminsky—Museum of Jewish Heritage
Kaminsky’s work took a significant toll on his health and personal life far beyond his sleep schedule. He sacrificed time with family, and ultimately went blind in one eye from his labor-intensive focus. Still, Kaminsky claimed no regrets, saying, “
Eventually after the encouragement of his children to share his story with the world, Kaminsky stepped out of the shadows, and the extent of his efforts became known. For his work in the French Resistance, Kaminsky was awarded several distinctions including the Medal of the Resistance. His daughter, Sarah Kaminsky, has worked to highlight her father’s legacy, lecturing internationally about his work, including at an event with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as writing his life story in the book, Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life. Kaminsky died earlier this year, at 97 years old, on January 9, 2023.
The forger who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis—CBS News—60 minutes overtime
Videos
Interview 60 minutes
New York Times—The Forger
Interview with Anders Rydell at Library of Congress
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Women in WWII
AI Overview—women forgers
During World War II, women in France forged identity documents to help Jewish children escape to Switzerland. One example is Eva Traube, who used her artistic skills to forge documents in a hidden library in a Catholic church. She worked with a fellow forger named Rémy to create a secret code and record the children's real names in a book.
Other women in the French Resistance during World War II included:
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade: Led the Resistance's largest spy ring, Alliance
Josephine Baker: Used her celebrity to gain access to high-ranking Axis officials
Tillion, Soilie, and Aubrac: Led information-gathering and communication efforts, gathered supplies, and took part in direct action
AI Overview—women forgers
Women in the French Resistance also worked in other ways, including:
Gathering military intelligence
Decoding messages
Managing underground publications
Running guns
Providing support for strikers
Sabotaging German communications
Working as typists and counterfeiters
Library of Congress
Women had a unique ability to serve as Resistants, in some part due to views among many Nazis that women were harmless and non-threatening. This misconception among the Germans meant that women were by default granted much greater latitude in moving around—and when apprehended were much more likely to convince officers or soldiers of their innocence. Often overlooked, they served as consummate spies. Often speeding along by bicycle, women devised all manner of ways to hide items in their purses and baskets. They used baby carriages as a sort of camouflage to transport goods. French women were unrivaled in their aplomb at casually chatting with German officers while sneaking Resistance materials to their next destination.
Women were invaluable as messengers and couriers; they carried everything from arms and ammunition to intelligence and Resistance propaganda. They also rescued airmen shot down by German forces, and operated what were called "escape lines" that served to usher US and British servicemen into safety. They gathered military intelligence (some of these women even worked with Madames in brothels that were frequented by German soldiers and where information could be gathered secretly), decoded messages, managed underground publications, ran guns, provided support for strikers, and carried out sabotage of German communications.
https://guides.loc.gov/french-resistance-world-war-two/women-in-the-french-resistance
Library of Congress
They worked in organizational capacities as typists and counterfeiters, and proved themselves brave and extraordinarily wily. Simply put, they undermined the Germans in a variety of ways at all levels.
Recent scholarship has finally brought women Resistants out from the shadows. Women were often slower than men to write about their experiences, but as decades went on, and in some cases archives opened, more of these stories came to light. There is a section in this guide about memoirs, and many are listed below, including those of the well-known Resistants Lucie Aubrac and Marie Madeleine Fourcade. Another valuable source of material are the statements made by individuals during interviews conducted immediately after the War.
As mentioned above, because many women were active in escape lines, some accounts of these women and their activities can be found in reports from those U.S. servicemen, which are available in the National Archives, Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. There are firsthand accounts of downed American airmen who were assisted by Resistants. Many of these accounts talk about being fed, given medical attention and shelter, and even being shepherded to a safehouse. For safety reasons, these women did not usually give their real names, thus they will forever remain anonymous.
https://guides.loc.gov/french-resistance-world-war-two/women-in-the-french-resistance
Library of Congress
As Margaret L. Rossiter notes in her study, Women in the Resistance, some women that have gained attention for their heroic acts managed to perform them while nonchalantly performing their day jobs. Jeanne Berthomier, who was a civil servant in the Ministry of Public Works in Paris, managed to deliver top-secret information typed on tissue paper to the Alliance chief, Marie Madeleine Fourcade.
Mme Paule Letty-Mouroux used her position as a secretary at the Marine de Toulon in order to report the repair status of Axis ships. Mme Marguerite Claeys collected information from agents who posed as customers at the company she owned with her husband— all without his knowledge. Simone Michel Lévy used her job in the Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone Service (PTT) to obtain intelligence about the Germans that she managed to send to London under the code name of Emma.
These women all took enormous risks and many of them were eventually caught and arrested by the German police. Simone herself was captured and deported to Ravensbrück where she continued to sabotage the Germans by organizing work stoppages of her inmates. The Germans sentenced her to death and she was hanged in April of 1945. She was later awarded the Cross of the Liberation and portrayed on a postage stamp that honored Resistants (Women in the Resistance, p.115).
https://guides.loc.gov/french-resistance-world-war-two/women-in-the-french-resistance
Library of Congress
Women from a variety of countries, including Britain and the US, served in the French Resistance. Isabel Townsend Pell was an American socialite who joined the French Resistance during World War II—one of the few women who was part of the Maquis—purportedly due to her good aim. Going by a code name of Fredericka, she was commonly known as "the girl with the blond mèche" (mèche de cheveux means lock of hair). She was imprisoned twice during the war, and subsequently decorated with the Legion of Honor for her service.
The stories of these women and countless others stand as testaments to the fact that no matter what role you have or where you find yourself, there is often a way to contribute to a larger cause. Although many of these women's names will never be known, their skill and passion contributed to the liberation of France.
Note: the webpage includes a list of some of the more notable women resisters and continues with a long list of books on this topic. If you're interested, use the link below.
https://guides.loc.gov/french-resistance-world-war-two/women-in-the-french-resistance
Next Week
Discussion of The Book of Lost Names
Kristin Harmel