Robert G Waite. Libraries & Culture. Volume 37, Issue 3, Summer 2002.
At the end of World War II, American troops discovered depots filled with millions of books that had been seized by the Nazis throughout Europe. The confiscation was part of the systematic effort by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews from Europe. Beginning in 1945, American occupation forces consolidated the books at the Offenbach Archival Depot for processing and eventual restitution to the country of origin and the books’ owners. Several individuals and organizations were instrumental in this process. The Offenbach Archival Depot, headed by Seymour Pomrenze, had the daunting task of sorting the books. Recommendations came from the Library of Congress, whose Mission, operating in Europe, was involved in purchasing and obtaining books for its collections, the occupation government, and the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission. By 1952 the looted books had largely been returned to their owners. About 150,000 heirless items (books whose owners could not be identified) were distributed by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to libraries in the United States and abroad.
Scholars have in recent years looked anew at the cultural policies of the Nazi regime, particularly the seizure of art objects within Germany and in the countries occupied by its military forces during World War II. Many of the works of art ended up in the collections of the Nazi elite, and competition was stiff for prized objects. The looted art was also sometimes used for political purposes, with select pieces displayed either to show the “degenerate” nature of modern art or to enhance the Nazi vision of art.
Another aspect of Nazi cultural aggression that has received less attention was the large-scale seizure and destruction of Jewish cultural items and books and the postwar efforts to restitute them. Many of the religious objects were taken and held by Nazi officials because of the value of the precious metals they contained. The seizure of cultural items and books from Jewish communities, associations, and organizations as well as the libraries of individuals began in Germany in the late 1930s and spread across Europe during the war. An untold number of books and cultural items were destroyed, with religious objects melted down to extract their precious metals and books burned or simply thrown onto rubbish heaps. The deliberate effort to annihilate Jewish life included the theft of cultural items such as books, especially religious and theological tracts. This systematic looting of Jewish culture devastated Jewish religious life throughout occupied Europe.
Although many books were destroyed, millions went to Nazi-sponsored research institutes and organizations such as the Security Police, the office of Alfred Rosenberg, and a handful of political-ideological research centers in Germany and central Europe. Ironically, these books survived the war. Following the war, several million volumes and large numbers of cultural and religious objects came into the hands of Allied military forces. According to the policies of the occupation powers, this material was to be restituted, where possible, to the original owners.
This essay examines the efforts by U.S. authorities and several organizations within that part of Germany designated the American Zone of Occupation to handle the books liberated by American troops late in the war. A handful of individuals from the U.S. Army, the Library of Congress and its Mission in Germany, and several Jewish organizations developed the plans for processing the looted books and returning them to their rightful owners whenever possible. The efforts of these individuals, their responses to an urgent and difficult situation, and their commitment to respond quickly, efficiently, and correctly are the focus of this essay.
The purpose of the Nazi institutes that held the books that survived the efforts to annihilate Judaism and that came into the possession of American armed forces late in the war was “to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for the virulent anti-Semitic propaganda,” wrote Jerome Michael, acting chairman of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. The most prominent and the agency with the largest library of looted material, the Institute for the Research of the Jewish Question, was located in Frankfurt under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg. Its holdings formed a large part of the materials recovered by American troops. These institutes held most of the books found by Allied troops at various locations as they advanced into Germany late in the war. In early 1945, before the inventorying of the books and cultural items had begun, the Rothschild Library in Frankfurt, a source of many of the looted books, was designated by U.S. forces as the collecting point for the materials found in what was to be the American Zone of Occupation. The lack of sufficient space and other logistical problems at the Rothschild Library led to the establishment by the Office of Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) of a collection center at Offenbach in a large building formerly owned by I. G. Farben. In late February 1946, Capt. (later Lt. Col.) Seymour J. Pomrenze, an archivist with solid administrative and academic experience, received the assignment to establish and organize an archival depot and to sort and restitute these materials in accordance with Allied agreements. The Offenbach Archival Depot was the center of the collection, processing, and restitution of looted books found in the American zone.
Shortly after he arrived in Offenbach, Pomrenze expanded the staff of the collection center and developed a plan for unpacking, sorting, and restituting in an orderly and expeditious manner the more than one million volumes he found awaiting him. More books arrived daily. Operations at the Offenbach Archival Depot expanded rapidly as more books arrived. On 1 May 1946 Offenbach was designated the “sole archival depot” in the American Zone of Occupation for the handling of looted books and archives that were subject to restitution.
During the spring of 1946, the Offenbach Archival Depot became fully staffed, and it was, a monthly report noted, “equipped to handle all archives, books and other library material which, if not arranged in an orderly sequence, require sorting in preparation for restitution by representatives of the country of origin.” OMGUS directed Pomrenze to contact the chief Museum Fine Arts & Archives (MFA&A) officer for each of the states in the American occupation zone and “make arrangements for the transfer to the Offenbach Archival Depot of all such material.” The shipments of books and cultural items to the Offenbach center were closely regulated and required the approval of the respective MFA&A officer. OMGUS also directed that “the archives, books and other library materials will be restituted to the countries of origin by the Director of the Offenbach Archival Depot in accordance with procedures set forth in Title 18, Military Government Regulations.”
During the several years of its operations, the Offenbach Archival Depot processed more than three million items. By the end of 1946, it had already returned approximately two million books. The disposition of these books can be followed through the monthly reports and other documentation. By early June 1946, for example, the Offenbach facility had returned almost 700,000 volumes to the countries of origin. To facilitate the restitution process and to identify the owners of the individual volumes, an official prepared albums of the book plates, markings, or stamps found in the books. Workers at the Offenbach Depot compared the plates in the individual books with those in the albums and the photographs of library markings and sorted the books accordingly. In addition, individuals from whom books or other items of cultural property had been seized could file claims to determine if the Offenbach Archival Depot held any of their property and to facilitate its return.
The Library of Congress also became involved in the handling of the looted books. In the summer of 1945, the Library of Congress reestablished a presence in Europe and resumed its main purpose there, namely, the purchase of books and newspapers for its collections and for distribution to other American libraries. The Library’s director, Dr. Luther H. Evans, prepared and issued instructions for the participation in the handling of materials captured and seized by Allied military forces. In regard to the millions of books stolen by the Nazis and the materials held at the Offenbach Archival Depot, Evans wrote in an in-house newsletter, “The problem of loot” was “naturally one of the most difficult problems we are called upon to face.” This issue had been “widely discussed by librarians in private conversations throughout the country, and it has been the subject of repeated discussions with members of the Mission, and with representatives of the War Department.”
Some materials for which the owners could not be identified or that had been produced by Nazi organizations and under Allied occupation statutes were to be destroyed were transferred to the Library of Congress. The first transfer of books and materials to the Library of Congress Mission from the Offenbach Archival Depot took place on 21 March 1946. The receipt for the shipment was signed by the deputy chief of the Mission and the director of the depot, Capt. S.J. Pomrenze, and it stated:
The 4712 items transferred conform to the specifications limiting the nature of the items to be transferred … and include books and other library materials which were the working portion of the Institut der NSDAP zur Erforschung der Judenfrage [Institute of the Nazi Party for the Research of the Jewish Question] but does not include material confiscated by the NSDAP from countries other than Germany which would be subject to normal restitution procedures.
Also typed on the receipt was the assurance that the Library of Congress Mission would “reimburse any possible claimants.” Pomrenze signed it and added: “I certify that I have this date inspected 4712 items receipted for above on 21 March 1946 at Offenbach Archival Depot, Offenbach, Germany and found said 4712 items to be within the category stipulated by the authority approving the transfer to the LCM.” The receipts for other transfers typically identified the size of the shipment by the number of cases or cartons and the nature of the materials.
Additional shipments of books followed. Although there is no list of the individual titles, correspondence from the Library of Congress Mission to the head of acquisitions in Washington discusses the sources of these books. It was the policy of the Library of Congress that items that might be restituted were not to be included. The transfer of books from the Offenbach Archival Depot to the Library of Congress in late March took place only after clearance was obtained from the highest levels of the occupation government.
Judging from the documentation on the transfer of publications to the Library of Congress Mission during 1946 and 1947, care was given to ensure that no restitutable material (that is, books looted by the Nazis whose owners could be identified) was transferred to the Library of Congress Mission. The available transfer memos and receipts stipulate that any restitutable material be sent to the Offenbach Archival Depot to be processed and returned in accordance with the Allied agreement. Some looted materials did, however, end up in the collections of the Library of Congress.
During the summer of 1946, it became clear that some of the books held in the Offenbach Archival Depot could not be restituted because the owners or countries of origin were not identifiable. The monthly reports from the Offenbach Archival Depot contained lists of the “unidentifiable collection,” books organized by language (including Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and German) and topic (“Jewish Libraries from Eastern Countries,” fine arts, religious subjects, encyclopedias, and dictionaries). The fate of these books, numbering about 500,000, became the subject of much interest and widespread discussion. The Library of Congress participated in some of these discussions and in late 1945 established contact with leading Jewish organizations in the United States.
In December 1945 Theodor H. Gaster, chief of the Hebraic Section at the Library of Congress and a founder of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, an organization based in New York, began “sounding out the views of representative Jewish scholars and librarians.” Gaster foresaw the commission working closely with the Library of Congress on this matter. He led the discussions with Jewish organizations in the United States and during the winter of 1945-46 had “already secured from these bodies expression of their willingness to cooperate.” Gaster concluded: “It may be assumed, therefore, that the program here outlined would have the full participation and support of representative American Jewish organizations.” Gaster’s plan, although not adopted by the Library of Congress and therefore not offered to the occupation government authorities, was simple. Those materials in the American Zone of Occupation “should pass into the trusteeship and control of the Library of Congress, as being the national library of the United States.” The Library of Congress would then have the authority to “deposit portions of the gross collection, at its discretion, on indefinite or 99-year loan with institutions in this country or abroad where it may be advised that they would be of greatest service.”
In late March the technical advisor for archives and libraries with the MFA&A, Paul Vanderbilt, suggested in a letter to Luther Evans that the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction play a central role in handling the looted materials whose owners could not be identified. The letter to Evans was passed to Gaster for his comments, which he wrote in the margins. These show that the links between the Library of Congress and the commission were strong. For example, Gaster wrote that Dr. Salo Baron, professor of Jewish literature and history at Columbia University and the top official of the commission, “has been in touch with me constantly.”
A meeting between Baron and Evans was arranged for late April 1946, and prior to that Evans laid out the position of the Library of Congress on “the matter of the eventual disposition of the undistributed Jewish books which will remain in the hands of the military authorities in occupied Germany following the restitution of all identifiable books to their owners.” First, he noted that the “identifiable groups of books” were to be restituted to their owners, a process already under way. Next came the “disposition of the unidentifiable residue,” and he wrote that that issue “will become one for international discussion between the occupying powers.”
During the spring of 1946, while these discussions were under way, the Offenbach Archival Depot processed and restituted the bulk of its holdings. All those books and materials for whom ownership could be determined went to their country of origin. Meanwhile, these discussions led to a letter from Professor Jerome Michael to the State Department describing a formal plan for handling the heirless materials.
Professor Michael stated that the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction was concerned with these materials primarily for two reasons: (1) they were stored under conditions that, he feared, hastened their deterioration, and (2) a policy of restoring the books and cultural items to former occupied countries, without regard for the present-day circumstances, would result in a “serious danger of dispersion.” In the latter case, the materials would no longer serve the “spiritual and religious needs of European Jews, of the Jewish people as a whole, and of all mankind.”
The basis for this conclusion was, as Michael pointed out in his letter, the great dispersal of the Jews of Europe caused by Nazi policies. He argued that the bulk of the cultural items should be removed from Europe, because with the “annihilation of millions of European Jews, including most of their religious leaders, scholars and teachers, and of the dispersion of the survivors, Europe is no longer, and it is very unlikely that it can again become, a center of Jewish spiritual and cultural activity.” He surmised that the new centers would be found in Israel and the United States and advocated the removal of the items to these locations.
The Jewish communities scattered throughout Europe certainly had legitimate claims to many of the objects, Michael acknowledged, and he called for the return of the cultural items to the rightful owners. Simply shipping objects and books looted from a community in a specific city back to that city, when most of the former citizens either had been killed or had emigrated, would, he wrote, be “most unwise and unfair…unwise because the almost certain result would be their dissipation, and unfair because the interests of the much larger number of members of the old communities who now live abroad and of the Jewish people would be sacrificed on the altar of legal title.”
Under the plan suggested by Michael, objects whose owners could be identified were to be returned upon satisfactory proof of ownership. Those items owned by a Jewish community would be restored to that community “in proportion to the prospective religious and cultural needs of the community and its capacity to retain, to care for, and to use them for the religious and cultural purposes for which they were intended.” Objects whose ownership could not adequately be proven or that remained unclaimed should, he urged, “be distributed among Jewish religious and cultural institutions upon and in accordance with the recommendations of the group of Jewish religious leaders, scholars, educators, constituting the Board of Advisors.” The board would be “guided in making such recommendations by the religious and cultural needs of the Jewish people and especially of the surviving victims of Nazi persecution and also by the desire of the Jewish people to pay tribute to those victims who did not survive.”
Professor Michael offered a detailed program to carry out this distribution plan. First, OMGUS “should declare that it or some other official agency” was the trustee of the Jewish cultural and religious objects. Second, OMGUS “should create a Board of Advisers to assist it in the execution of its trust,” and the members of this board would be nominated on the recommendation of “the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the Hebrew University, and the Synagogue Council of America.” Such a board, Michael wrote, “will recognize the special and exclusive interest of the Jewish people in these objects.” Third, the Library of Congress would classify and catalog the books, a process that would “greatly facilitate the safeguarding and ultimate disposition of those objects.” This was a task that “only librarians, bibliographers, and other experts can perform.”
Michael’s plan circulated among the staffs of the MFA&A and the Restitutions Branch of OMGUS during the summer of 1946. On 16 August 1946 the chief of the Restitution Branch, Col. John H. Allen, responded. He supported the creation of a “representative body” that would include members from the State Department, the Library of Congress, UNESCO, the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, and other “Jewish interests” “for the purpose of arriving at a decision on the disposal of material defined in para. 2 [items in the Offenbach Archival Depot that are associated with Jewish cultural and religious life].” Allen stated clearly that the Library of Congress “should not be charged with any classifying, cataloguing or other work on the collection in Europe.” That would be done by the staff of the Offenbach Archival Depot.
An important result of Michael’s eloquent statement of the position of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission was a meeting on 19 June 1946 at the State Department that approved the commission s proposal. That organization would be prominent in the handling of the heirless materials, and the Library of Congress would serve only in an advisory role, assisting the commission in handling and processing the books. At the meeting of commission and State Department representatives, it was pointed out that if no request and transfer of the books followed, “OMGUS may be inclined to treat the books as part of the total economic assets in its hands to be ultimately turned over to the Landerrat governments to be handled under established restitution procedures.” In other words, if no action were taken soon, the heirless books would be transferred to the local German state governments. The issue was gaining urgency.
While the discussions were under way, several additional suggestions for handling these materials were made. In late 1945, for example, it was suggested that a Jewish library in Copenhagen be founded, “formed out of the many thousands of valuable Jewish books which have been found in German occupied territory and which cannot be returned to their previous owners.” The project received the endorsement of Danish authorities, and strong interest was expressed by UNESCO. This plan was, however, not developed further. In late 1945 and early 1946, the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction developed a plan for the distribution of the heirless books and cultural items. The commission recommended they be distributed to centers of Judaism and Jewish learning throughout the United States and Israel.
A similar plan was proposed in an article on Jewish cultural treasures in Axis-occupied countries that appeared in the January 1946 issue of Jewish Social Studies. The article called for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission to lead the way “in the restoration and/or reconstruction of the cultural aspects of European Jewish life and in the rehabilitation or redistribution of such Jewish cultural institutions (libraries, museums, schools, archives, etc.) as have been destroyed or confiscated.”
In late March 1946, Paul Vanderbilt responded to the plan for the disposition of the heirless books held at the Offenbach Archival Depot in a letter to Luther Evans. As a friend of the depot’s director, Seymour Pomrenze, he hoped to find an expeditious and sensible solution. Vanderbilt recommended that Pomrenze “sort out and return to the countries from which they were taken… all the material whose source is determinable.” That task would be completed “about June first.” At that time, an estimated 500,000 books, the heirless or unidentifiable materials, would be left in the depot. “The decision on who gets this indeterminate stuff is hot. MFA and A doesn’t want any part of it,” Vanderbilt wrote. “You can help, if you will.”
Vanderbilt attributed the following plan to Captain Pomrenze: “Let the Commission [on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction] approach the Library of Congress and ask to have this lot of material turned over to them through the agency of the Library of Congress Mission so that the Commission may decide what is to be done with it, do the necessary distributing, and take the responsibility.” This would get the books to those institutions in the United States that could best use them, he maintained, but that did “not necessarily mean that the books would all stay in America.” Vanderbilt made it clear that his objective was to streamline the procedure and hasten the resolution of the issue. “The point is that channels by which Military Government can turn material over to the LC mission are already established and working, whereas to start a new channel is complex and would take way beyond June 1.” Vanderbilt believed that the commission was best equipped to deal with these books and was the most appropriate org anization to dispose of them efficiently and fairly.
Luther Evans gave the plan serious consideration, noting in a 3 June 1946 letter that Vanderbilt’s suggestions had been “at the center of a number of discussions with persons interested, including especially Dr. Baron and Professor Michael of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.” He concluded, however, that the “LC will take no action.” The Library of Congress chose not to intercede until all of the looted material had been returned to the country of origin and, it assumed, to the legitimate owners.
With Vanderbilt’s suggestions rejected, little progress was made on resolving the issue of the heirless books, the items of unidentifiable origin. The Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction continued to present itself as the proper organization to handle their disposition. In a long letter to the assistant secretary of state, dated 5 June 1946, Professor Jerome Michael described in detail the background to the commission’s operations as well as its concerns about the conditions in which the materials were stored and the ultimate fate of these items. Finally, he offered a plan for their disposition.
Over the next two years little progress was made. In late 1948 discussions between the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Foundation, also referred to as the Restitution Successor Organization, and OMGUS concerning the disposition of the books remaining unclaimed or unrestituted in the Offenbach Archival Depot continued. A formal request that this organization assume responsibility for the remaining material was made on 20 December, and an agreement followed.
According to a memorandum of agreement signed on 15 February 1949, “Jewish cultural properties, separated from owning individuals and organizations in Europe during the period of Nazi rule, taken into custody by the U.S. Military Government in occupied Germany, listed by categories below and to be specifically listed in inventories and receipts, are transferred herewith to JCR, Inc., subject to the conditions set forth herein.” Under the agreement, this organization agreed to act as the trustee “in receiving this property for the Jewish people and in distributing it to such public or quasi-public religious, cultural, or educational institutions as it sees fit to be used in the interest of perpetuating Jewish art and culture.”
The agreement stated that the items in question included solely those that are “unidentifiable” and for which “no claims have been received for and no identification of prior ownership can be reasonably established for the properties” Under supplements to the agreement, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Foundation received the properties “on a custody basis only” and agreed to “seek the rightful owners, and will deliver them to properly identified claimants.” The items were to be turned over by 30 May 1949.
The transfers began in May and continued through the fall of 1949. By early 1950 fully two thirds of the books at the Central Collection Point in Wiesbaden, which held the remaining materials after the closing of the Offenbach Archival Depot, were ready for shipment or had already been shipped. As the trustee for the books, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Foundation developed a procedure for the restitution or distribution of the books whose owners could still not be identified or located. “In all cases in which one owner possesses six or more books, we shall make every effort to locate the former owner or his heirs,” Hannah Arendt, the foundation’s executive secretary, wrote. “We shall type out a list of all these persons, photo-stat them, deposit them in the major Jewish organizations and institutions all over the world and then give this list a vast publicity through newspaper advertising all over the world.” Such materials would, however, if not claimed be offered to libraries and institutions with the stipulation that they are “obliged to return any books identified by a claimant as his property within two years of its delivery to the recipient.”
Between 1 July 1949 and 30 November 1950, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Foundation distributed over 79,000 books to more than two dozen libraries, including the Library of Congress. By 31 January 1952 it had turned over to libraries in the United States more than 150,000 items. Most went to seventeen “priority libraries.” According to these figures, the Library of Congress, placed in the fourth category, “non-Jewish libraries,” received a total of 5,708 items. The restitution and disposal of the books found in the American Zone of Occupation that had been looted by the Nazis from Jewish communities throughout Europe was completed.
By 1951 the efforts to find the owners of Jewish cultural and religious materials looted by the Nazis and the restitution of these items had largely been completed in Europe. The institutions and individuals who in the spring of 1945 faced the daunting issue of sorting through millions of books, identifying, where possible, the owners of the books, and then returning them to the country of origin for distribution to the owners had completed their task. Within a short amount of time, most of the books had been restituted, as prescribed in postwar agreements. The remaining books, the heirless materials whose owners could not be identified, were turned over to the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission for distribution to libraries and institutions where they would continue to benefit Jewish communities.
The disposition of the books that could not be restituted, the heirless or unidentifiable materials, came after long negotiations and serious thought by the responsible military authorities and interested civilian institutions. The transfer of the remaining books to the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., was a fair and thoughtful resolution, one that ensured that the texts and cultural items stolen by the Nazis from Jewish libraries and collections throughout occupied Europe, centers of Judaism that had been wiped out by the Nazis, would continue to serve their intended purpose. The new centers of Jewish life and learning in the United States and Israel, the communities they served, and some Jewish libraries were the benefactors of this operation.