Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library A
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Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library A. D. Harvey The British Library possesses eleven or twelve thousand books seized from German libraries and institutions between June 1944, when Anglo-American forces invaded western Europe, and 1947.1 Nearly half the confiscated books came from a single library,that of the German Army’s Kriegsschule at Hanover, and were offered to the British Museum, the institution of which the present British Library was then a part, by Brigadier H. B. Latham on behalf of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Cabinet and the Minister of Defence in July 1946.2 There is no circumstantial record of how the other books reached the British Museum. The earliest date stamps show February 1946 but many volumes have been stamped at a later period with a stamp set to show no date. Some items were still being catalogued in 1997. Apart from the books from the Kriegsschule at Hanover, known in the British Library as the Hanover Military Library,about ten per cent of the confiscated books received stamps – sometimes more than one – from institutions which housed them prior to their arrival in Britain. These show that the books came from three main sources. First, there are books seized during the military campaign in western Europe – i.e. before 8 May 1945. Throughout the twentieth century it was routine procedure for invading armies to lay hands on all documentation found at enemy command posts, headquarters and administrative offices, in order for it to be analysed for intelligence purposes. At least one item now in the British Library (shelfmark 08072.d.98) bears the stamp Captured Document … Third U.S. Infantry Div: Document Section, with spaces for Location: Capt. Unit: Date-Time: Translated not filled in.3 Another item (X.808/39166) has two stamps: 27 AUG 1944 and 563 Sig.AW Bn, the latter being a U.S. Army communications unit.4 Such items were forwarded to Paris, where they were stamped: Return to Supreme Headquarters Document Center 19 Ave. d’Iena, Paris (fig.1.) 1 I am grateful to P.R. Harris, and John Hopson, British Library Archivist, for background information and to Graham Nattrass, Head of the British Library’s German Section, for help and advice throughout. 2 British Museum Archives: Report to Trustees 12 Oct. 1946. 3 The Third U.S. Infantry Division was a unit withdrawn from the Italian front and landed in the south of France in August 1943; later it operated in Alsace: see Donald G.Taggart, History of the Third Infantry Division: in World War II (Washington, 1947), passim. 4 This item — Hans Pflug, Donau und Donauraum, in the series Tornisterschriften des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (issued for use within the Wehrmacht only), in very bad condition — is unusual in having, instead of a Document Center stamp, a notation in crayon PID/OSS/PWD,i.e.Political Intelligence Department,Office of Strategic Services, Political Warfare Department. The first and last of these organizations were off-shoots of the British Foreign Office, the second of the American State Department — which makes it something of a mystery who it could have been who marked the book with crayon. 1 eBLJ 2003,Article 4 Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library Fig.1. Englands Alleinschuld am Bombenterror (Berlin, 1943). BL 09101.c.36 2 eBLJ 2003,Article 4 Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library The SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) Document Center seems to have become something of a dumping ground for books seized from German offices in occupied France though it is likely that the books were regarded as of less value, from the military intelligence point of view, than a variety of typescript and manuscript items taken from German headquarters installations: on the other hand there was a large civil affairs component at SHAEF and the stamp at least suggests routine circulation between offices of interesting items. A couple of books with SHAEF stamps have pencilled notes indicating that they came from south-western Germany, an area invaded and later occupied by American forces. Other items bear the stamp of the Deutsche Akademie Lektorat Brüssel — a German- language reading room in Brussels presumably of pre-war origin; SHAEF’s copy of Ludwig Gessner, Der Zusammenbruch des Zweiten Reiches (9385.bb.26) bears the stamp (with official Nazi eagle and swastika) of the Direktor der Lehrerbildungsanstalt in Eupen, Eupen being a German-speaking area of Belgium annexed to Germany 1940-1944. The commonest German stamp in SHAEF-stamped books however is that of the Deutsche Schule Bücherei (i.e. Library of the German School). This was an organization set up in Paris after the German occupation, presumably to encourage the teaching of the German language in French schools: a copy of the teacher’s notes for the Middle Level volumes of Fritz Rahn, Die Schule des Schreibens (Frankfurt, 1932 — British Library shelfmark 12964.n.17) contains the stamp not only of the Deutsche Schule Bücherei but also that of the Deutsche Schul- Zirkel Paris and Jugend-Bücherei Deutsche Botschaft Paris (i.e. Juvenile Library of the German Embassy Paris). A copy of Gerhard Herrmann, Die Dardanellen (9088.a.17), about the British defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, stamped Deutsche Leihbücherei der Propaganda Abteilung (German Lending Library of the Propaganda Department) was also probably acquired in Paris. A couple of items commandeered from the Deutsche Akademie Lektorat (or Mittelstelle) Paris did not receive a SHAEF stamp but were sent directly to the Political Intelligence Department (an off-shoot of the Foreign Office) in London, being later passed on to the Foreign Office Library, and from the Foreign Office Library to the British Museum.5 Secondly, there are a number of books seized in the months following the Unconditional Surrender of Germany from libraries in the British Zone of Occupation.6 Whereas many of the books from the Deutsche Schule Bücherei in Paris were perfectly innocuous grammar books, or even dictionaries from the pre-Nazi era, which had been seized simply as part of the process of taking control of everything connected with the German military occupation of France, the seizures in Germany all related to the process of denazification. Some of the libraries involved were Nazi Party facilities or military institutions which the Allies aimed to liquidate in their entirety. A copy of Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (08072.d.99) bears the stamp Nationalsozialist. Deutsche Arbeitspartei Ortsgr.Vreden and a copy of Alfred Rosenberg, Kampf an die Macht (12302.a.41) is stamped HJ – Gebietsführerschule II (i.e. Hitler Youth District Leader School No. 2). Such party institutions were a priority target for denazification procedures. The British occupation 5 For example 4572.ee.12 (Heinz Ballensiefen, Juden in Frankreich [1941]) and 8198.f.14 (Hermann Göring, Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Erich Gritzbach, 4th edn, 1940). 6 There are also some books from schools in the British Zone of Occupation in Vienna,e.g. 12557.pp.38 (Hans Fr. Blunck, Die Mär vom gottabtrünnigen Schiffer:Aus dem Roman „Berend Fock" [1933]: stamped Direktion der staatlichen Oberschule für Jungen Wien 15. Braunschweigplatz 6) and 20011.f.8 (Ernst Krieck, Nationalpolitische Erziehung (1939), stamped Hagenbrunn: Allgemeine Volksschule der Stadt Wien 21: für Knaben u. Mädchen). 3 eBLJ 2003,Article 4 Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library authorities may also have disliked the sound of the Aufklärungsausschuss Hamburg-Bremen (i.e. Enlightenment Committee Hamburg-Bremen) and the Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschaft- Archiv (i.e. Hamburg Global Economics Archives) — or perhaps it was simply that their choice of books was disapproved of — e.g. Heinrich Goitsch, Niemals (YA.1993.a.18322) a polemic against Germany’s ubiquitous and insatiate enemies concluding Wir wollen frei sein, wie die Väter waren! Eher Tod als in der Knechtschaft leben! and Wolfgang Höfler, Zur Struktur der jüdischen Weltmacht (On the Structure of Jewish World Power) (4035.d.13). There are also several books from the Naval School at Flensburg-Murwik stamped Kriegsmarine-Bücherei Marineschule: Flensburg-Murwik (fig. 2), including a copy of the eighth edition (1051.-1080.Tausend) of Hitler’s Speech at the 1938 Parteitag and Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Freimaurerei (Studies in the Intellectual History of Freemasonry) by future Einsatzkommando leader (and publicity director of Porsche) Dr Franz Alfred Six.7 There are a couple of items from Wehrkreisbücherei X, Hamburg (fig. 3). There are several notably innocuous items — novels, a civilian trade training manual etc. — stamped Einheit L 3491 Luftgau-Postamt which seems to refer to some sort of lending library service for Luftwaffe personnel.8 Books taken from schools in Germany are mainly but not exclusively ones that might be regarded as politically undesirable — but a survey of the British Library’s stock suggests a random operation involving no more than single visits to a minority of schools. There are books from at least three different schools in Bottrop, but all of them in the distinctive format of the Marholds Jugendbücher series, as if the people responsible for confiscating them were looking specifically for Marhold books. The only other town in the British Zone where more than one schoolbook collection yielded books that ended up in the British Library was Braunschweig, and whereas the Marhold books from Bottrop were on inflammatory topics — Unsere Kolonien!, Ein Kampf für Deutschland, Männer unter Stahlhelm and so on — Braunschweig’s Hilfsbücherei der I. Oberschule für Mädchen was forced to surrender a copy of The English Reader: Ausgabe für Mädchen in Ehlermann’s Englisches Unterrichtswerk für Oberschulen series (12987.b.16) and the Schülerbücherei of Braunschweig’s Lehrerbildungsanstalt was deprived of a copy of the Mittelstufe: Erstes Heft: Klasse 3 volume of Fritz Rahn, Schule des Schreibens (12964.n.7).