A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust
416
A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust
416Hardcover
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Overview
The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust
In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution.
A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust.
The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781479833955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New York University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2019 |
| Series: | Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History , #17 |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Confronting the Present
The Offenbach Archival Depot
The American Antithesis of Nazi Plunder
In April 1948, Severin Rochmann, a rabbi working in a camp for Jewish displaced persons in Zeilsheim near Frankfurt, entered the American military government's Offenbach Archival Depot for the first time. Towering before him, on four floors of what had been an I. G. Farben industrial complex on the banks of the River Main, were millions of books, manuscripts, incunabula, Torah scrolls, ritual objects, and documents. American soldiers and civilian assistants had brought these cultural assets — looted and confiscated between 1933 and 1945 by Nazi units such as the ERR — to Offenbach with the aim of identifying them and returning them to their owners. Most of the items assembled there came from major Jewish libraries, schools, and synagogues across Europe. The crates also held thousands of volumes seized from private Jewish collections throughout the former German-occupied areas. What the rabbi saw far exceeded his expectations. A few months later, Rochmann — together with a German staff member from the depot, Peter Leinekugel — went on to write a descriptive report about the activities in Offenbach in which he articulated his astonishment at the collection: "It is surely no exaggeration to state that there is no longer a city in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe, that accommodates within its walls such a large number of Hebrew books. [...] If one compiled a bibliography of all these books it would undoubtedly be a comprehensive work, a near-complete catalogue of all Hebrew and Jewish books." At the same time, Rochmann was struck by the tragic quality of the place: "All the books and other treasures housed in the Archival Depot amount to one of the saddest testaments to the Nazis' war on Judaism [...]. They await their previous owners. Many will never make it back into the hands of their former custodians. They were wiped from the book of life by the Nazi regime's campaign of annihilation. But these books and objects, these precious relics, will always enjoin us to remember those they once belonged to."
The special character of this place is evident in these few lines written in 1948. Being in the depot, surrounded by a chaotic mass of items crammed into the available space, was like standing amid the preserved remnants of Jewish culture in Europe. But, much like Germany's displaced persons camps for Jewish survivors en route to emigration, this place was of a transitory character. For a short time, the depot served as a kind of warehouse of Jewish tradition and knowledge, its holdings reflecting the diversity and breadth of Europe's pre-1933 Jewish worlds. The history of the European Jews' persecution and annihilation was inscribed in this place and its collection. But it was to be no enduring memorial. In a historically unparalleled restitution process, its holdings were to be returned to their previous owners as quickly as possible. The groundwork for this process had already been laid during the war: as early as autumn 1943, the Civil Affairs Division of the US War Department had established the MFA&A, a unit operating in the European theater tasked with protecting cultural heritage at risk of looting, bombardment, and other war-related threats. After the war, its main task was to seek out and recover the millions of cultural assets displaced and confiscated by the Nazis. Similar units existed in the British and French zones. In cellars, mines, castles, collieries, country estates, and cultural institutions, they found endless quantities of books, documents, and artifacts hidden by the relevant German plunder units to protect them from Allied bombs and keep them out of Allied hands. The MFA&A officers found more than 1,400 such caches, transferring the works of art, library and archival holdings, and ritual objects stashed there to specially created collecting points. Seven such points were established in the American occupation zone to store items and organize restitution; the main ones were located in Munich, Offenbach, and Wiesbaden, with smaller counterparts in Bamberg, Celle, Marburg, and Nuremberg. The American zone was the central locus of cultural restitution because most looted cultural assets were found there. This entailed that the American authorities launched the earliest and most comprehensive initiatives to salvage and return them. Their pioneering role in restitution policy, however, was chiefly the result of the comprehensive preparatory work done by various political interest groups within the United States before Germany's surrender; another key factor was America's geographical distance from the European theater of war, which had spared it the kind of material damage, confiscations, and destruction suffered by the Soviet Union, France, and — to a more limited degree — the United Kingdom.
The American MFA&A officers sought to reverse the damage done by the Nazis' notorious looting raids and Rosenberg's confiscation policy. With respect to the Offenbach Depot, established in early 1946, which chiefly housed stolen Jewish books, documents, archival materials, and ritual objects, they expressed this aspiration explicitly: "The antithesis of the plundering Nazi Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Offenbach Archival Depot, without fanfare, has accomplished the biggest book-restitution operation in library history. [...] This restitution operation forever will remain as living proof of the ideals of democracy."
The Americans saw the depot as the lynchpin of initiatives to salvage Jewish cultural assets and linked it with hopes of the reconstruction and continued existence of the Jewish cultural and intellectual world and the prospect of a new, democratic Europe. Many Jews, meanwhile, began to view it as a monument to the Nazis' violence and destruction.
Processes of Looting
The Nazi looting of art and cultural assets had had a particularly deleterious effect on Jewish cultural property, which was a key target of the Germans' zealous destruction, desecration, and confiscation of "enemy" objects. After January 1933, Hitler's seizure of power sparked the development of a complex system of (sometimes competing) German institutions and units concerned with the expropriation and destruction of Jewish cultural assets. This system was far from peripheral within the new political apparatus. It involved "meticulously prepared campaigns" central to Nazi power politics that were "carried out with painstaking professionalism." The looting of famous and valuable works of art from European museum and private collections, which was often personally sponsored and exploited by Nazi leaders, must be clearly distinguished from the multifaceted programs of spoliation and destruction targeted at Jewish books and ritual objects. These initiatives were motivated less by illicit enrichment and avarice than the anti-Semitic conviction that taking Jewish books and other items was an important means of eliminating Jews' cultures of knowledge and intellectual traditions in Europe — and thus a key component in the ideological struggle against them. Initially the focus was on the wanton destruction of Jewish libraries and book holdings categorized as "un-German," manifested most strikingly in the public book burnings of 1933. But the Nazis increasingly recognized the value of Jewish and other proscribed printed works for their own research and ideological warfare. They had modified their approach accordingly by the time of the Reichspogromnacht (or Kristallnacht), when the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) ordered the seizure of the archival material in every synagogue and Jewish business.
The key protagonist in the Nazi program of cultural spoliation was Alfred Rosenberg. As commissioner for the education and training of NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) members, he was entrusted with the creation of a National Socialist university, the so-called Hohe Schule on the shores of the Chiemsee, which was established in January 1940. To this end, he was authorized by Hitler to begin working in the "fields of research and the establishment of libraries." Rosenberg was thus given free rein to order the plundering of libraries and other collections of cultural assets in all the occupied areas if their holdings seemed relevant to his research institute. His task force, the ERR, was set up in July 1940, followed in March 1941 by the official opening of the first subdivision of the university, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt am Main. Over the next few years, the institute, headed by historian Wilhelm Grau, came to house one of the largest collections of stolen Judaica and Hebraica in the world in its building on the Bockenheimer Landstraße in Frankfurt's Westend. As a result of the ERR raids that plagued France and Eastern Europe in particular, the institute library comprised more than 40,000 volumes of the Jewish education and welfare organization Alliance Israélite Universelle Paris; 20,000 volumes from the Lipschuetz Jewish bookstore in Paris; parts of the private Parisian libraries of Guy, Maurice, and Robert Rothschild; and 760 crates from the archive of the Rothschild Freres Bank in Paris. Rosenberg's library also contained all the important Jewish collections from the Netherlands, including 20,000 volumes from the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana; more than 25,000 volumes taken from the Sephardic community of Amsterdam; and the collections of the Netherlands Israelite Seminary of Amsterdam (Nederlands Israelitisch Seminarium) and the Spinoza Society. Around 280,000 volumes in the library came from the task force's depots in Riga, Kaunas, Vilna, Minsk, and Kiev — including the lion's share of the YIVO collection. ERR operations extended from Scandinavia through the Soviet Union and France to Greece, and the library in Frankfurt had soon accumulated a collection of tremendous quantity and quality. Even before its foundation, the mayor of Frankfurt, Friedrich Krebs, had ceded to Rosenberg responsibility for the venerable collection of Judaica and Hebraica held by the city and university library. The core of the institute's holdings thus constituted one of the largest and most important Jewish libraries in continental Europe. Fears that it might be destroyed by Allied bombings of Frankfurt prompted the library's near-complete transfer to, and concealment in, various official buildings and the castle complex in the Hesse town of Hungen in mid-1943.
Before the institute's establishment in Frankfurt, a central library for the planned Hohe Schule had been founded in Berlin in early 1939 under the leadership of Walter Grothe, an institution that later engaged in extensive cooperation with the Frankfurt Institute. To protect it from bomb attacks, in October 1942, much of the central library was relocated to St. Andrä in Carinthia, and from September 1944 onward it was cached at the Tanzenberg monastic estate twenty miles away. The seven hundred thousand volumes of the central library included collections looted by the ERR in Paris, such as the private collection of Édouard de Rothschild; holdings from the library of the eminent rabbinical school established in 1829 by the consistoire (École Rabbinique); divisions of the Alliance; Hans Fürstenberg's famous private library in Berlin; and numerous collections from the Soviet Union, mostly plundered by the Künsberg Unit (Kommando Künsberg), which answered to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Another prominent player in the Nazi program of cultural spoliation was the "Ancestral Heritage" (Ahnenerbe) organization, which functioned as a subunit of the Schutzstaffel (SS) under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler. Set up in 1935, by 1944 it consisted of forty research groups. Within the Nazi interpretive paradigm, these groups explored topics in archaeology, history, racial science (Rassenkunde), ethnology, biology, medicine, and genetics. Units of this organization also looted in the Soviet Union, chiefly in the wake of the SS's brutal campaigns. The research institutions where anti-Jewish "science" (Gegnerforschung; "enemy science") was carried out during the Nazi period were key beneficiaries of the comprehensive looting of books and archival materials. Prominent among them were the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage, founded in 1935 in Berlin as part of the Reich Propaganda Ministry [Reichspropagandaministerium]); Office VII Ideological Research and Evaluation of Worldviews (Amt VII Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswertung) of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA), founded in 1939; the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany (Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschland) in Berlin, founded in 1935, led by Walter Frank; the Reich Institute's Research Department on the Jewish Question (Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage), founded in 1936, initially led by Wilhelm Grau in Munich; the aforementioned Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt am Main, to which Grau later moved following the transfer of all the Munich Research Department's responsibilities to Berlin; and the Department of Jewish Research (Referat Judenforschung) at the Institute for German Work in the East (Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit) in Kraków (founded in 1940), led by Josef Sommerfeldt. Research on the "Jewish question" was also being pursued and promoted at many universities. All National Socialist research contexts saw the appropriation and recoding of the questions and content central to scholarly studies on Jewish topics, the strengthening of anti-Semitic research traditions, and the ideological reconfiguration of both the materials and findings of predominately Jewish science and teaching. These processes were complementary to the expulsion and murder of the German and European Jewry. They were directly linked with the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish policies, undergirding and "legitimizing" acts of violence against Jews and their advancing annihilation. Rivaling Rosenberg's collecting mania, Office VII of the RSHA, under the supervision of Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Franz Alfred Six, built up the second-largest library of looted materials. It systematically confiscated and collected all the files, archival materials, and books of those political parties, lodges, and political associations labeled as "enemies," along with major holdings of individual Jewish communities and institutions. Contemporary witnesses estimated the holdings of this library at between two and three million volumes. These were stored in the occupied Grand Landlodge of the Freemasons of Germany (Große Landesloge der Freimaurer von Deutschland) in Berlin-Schöneberg and in a nearby synagogue. A labor unit (Arbeitskommando), which the Reich Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland) was compelled to set up in 1941 and that initially included eight Jewish scholars, dealt with books of Jewish provenance among these holdings. Among other things, the Jewish collection included books taken from the Vienna Israelite Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien); the holdings of the Jewish communities of Berlin, Warsaw, Munich, Hamburg, Gleiwitz (Gliwice), and Breslau (Wroclaw); the Jewish Theological Seminary (Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fraenkel'sche Stiftung) in Breslau; the library of the former Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens); the holdings of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin; and several hundred thousand volumes from the private libraries of Karl Adler, Ludwig Marcuse, André Maurois, Ernst Posener, Walther Rathenau (Rathenau Foundation), Arthur Rubinstein, Isac Leo Seeligmann, and Joseph Wirth.
The classicist Ernst Grumach was appointed head of the Jewish labor unit. He and Berthold Breslauer, previously archivist of the Bleichröder banking house, were the only members of the first forced labor team to survive. All its other members were deported to Auschwitz with their families in 1943. The group of twenty-five forced laborers who replaced them, who had escaped the great wave of deportations from Berlin because they were married to non-Jewish women, survived the war purely by chance. In August 1943, Himmler ordered the establishment of new repositories in Silesia, Bohemia, and Thuringia to protect the books and manuscripts from war damage, decimating the library holdings in Berlin. Most of the collections that remained there, such as major divisions of the Vienna Jewish Community Library (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien Bibliothek) and the Berlin Library of the Hochschule der Wissenschaft des Judentums, were consumed in fires resulting from aerial bombings. Following Germany's capitulation, the small number of books that survived these fires fell prey to the plunder carried out by both the general population and soldiers. What was left after the war Grumach handed over to the American military authorities, who in turn transferred them to Offenbach. He also helped the MFA&A units, local Jewish actors and private individuals in their search for holdings of the RSHA library. His "Report on the Confiscation and Treatment of Former Jewish Library Holdings by the State Police Authorities, 1933–1945" was the first detailed account of the library's component parts and their whereabouts after 1943 and was thus crucial to finding and salvaging its books and manuscripts.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1 Confronting the Present: The Offenbach Archival Depot 17
2 Envisioning a Future: American-Jewish Politics of Restitution 61
3 Reconstructing Jewish Culture: The New Map of Jewish Life after 1945 113
4 Building the New State: Israel and the European Jewish Cultural Heritage 163
5 Taking Action in Dark Times: The Commitment of Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and Gershom Scholem 195
Conclusion 243
Acknowledgments 255
Notes 259
Bibliography 323
Index 365
About the Author 383
About the Translator 385
Plates follow page 182