Epilogue

I have lived with a rare book for nearly half a century—Baruch Spinoza’s Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I & II, published in 1663 by the printer Johannem Riewerts in Amsterdam. My father gave it to me when I was learning high school Latin, and it has accompanied me from suburban Chicago to Philadelphia, with many points in between. He had received it in the early 1950s, from his oldest brother who was then sick and dying. Reuben Peiss had hoped to be a philosopher, but his life followed a different path, into librarianship and then, through the strange fortunes of war, into intelligence work and mass acquisitions abroad. But his early interests never faded, and this book must have been of great value to him. As my father observed, “Spinoza was his guy.” I never thought much about the book, except to appreciate its aura of rarity, until I started upon this research. Where had it come from? How had Reuben Peiss acquired it, and from whom?...

Book Burning—American Style

The American military government in Germany faced a particular problem of mass acquisitions tied to postwar occupation policy. The Allies had agreed to purge Nazism from the German book world. The military confiscated countless volumes, sequestering and even destroying them. Bookstores and publishers had been forced to surrender these works. Over time this became an operation to make an entire body of published works inaccessible and unreadable. Communications experts, social scientists, progressive educators, and librarians applied their expertise to achieve this goal. However, when Order No. 4 was issued, requiring the confiscation and destruction of all Nazi material, including books in public libraries, many Americans accused the military of engaging in book burning. The episode reveals tensions over the relationship between reading, freedom, democracy, and the wartime state.

Introduction

World War II witnessed an unprecedent effort by American librarians, scholars, intelligence agents, and the military to acquire foreign publications and information. In a total war, the book world became a terrain of battle. Fighting the enemy required the mobilization of knowledge, including the open-source intelligence gleaned in publications. It involved ideological confrontations between freedom and fascism that required the elimination of Nazi literature. And it prompted new attention to the preservation of culture and, as the scale of Nazi pillaging became clear, the restitution of looted books. Wartime mobilization encouraged librarians and scholars to put their professional expertise to these efforts. Some of those involved were public figures, but most were ordinary individuals, predominantly men, from a range of backgrounds, who came together in the unique conditions of the war.

Not a Library, but a Large Depot of Loot

The discovery of looted books at the end of the war, especially those from Jewish libraries, tested the American military government. Gathering, conserving, and identifying them posed intractable challenges, even as American authorities faced domestic and international pressures over the Jewish books in particular. The Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) unit of the US Army, known as the Monuments Men, requisitioned Frankfurt’s Rothschild Library and later moved to a warehouse known as the Offenbach Archival Depot to establish operations for book restitution. This required innovative methods of librarianship designed to quickly manage and redistribute disarrayed and damaged volumes. The American government finally authorized Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. to handle the unidentifiable and heirless books, many of which came to the United States. For the Americans, these endangered books generated new understandings of the meaning of book collections, ownership, restitution, and cultural heritage.

Acquisitions on a Grand Scale

After the war, the new Librarian of Congress Luther Evans worked with State and War Department officials on a plan to send library agents to Europe. The agents would acquire every book published in Germany and occupied countries and distribute them to American research libraries. The Library of Congress Mission to Europe was a unique collecting effort that acquired 1.5 million books, periodicals, and other materials. Initially a book-purchasing plan, it evolved into an industrial-scale acquisitions program under the American military government in Germany. It seized works from research institutes, specialized libraries, and Nazi collections, helped US Army document centers screen confiscated works, and acquired materials deemed to have no intelligence value. In its short existence, the mission embodied a new commitment among American research libraries, that large international collections were necessary to serve the national interest.

Librarians and Collectors Go to War

The OSS sent librarians and scholars to outposts in Stockholm, Lisbon, and other neutral cities to spearhead a vast collecting and microfilming operation. They acquired enemy newspapers, scientific journals, resistance pamphlets, and other types of open-source intelligence. Crossing paths with spying allies, enemy provocateurs, booksellers, and gossips, the librarians turned into intelligence agents, who used their professional skills in a dangerous information economy. Publications came to have value and meaning as intelligence. The OSS librarians confronted the problem of information overload as thousands of microfilm reels arrived in Washington. Through classifications, indexes, abstracts, and full-text translations, work done not by computers but by women and émigrés, they pioneered applied techniques of information science.

Conclusion

The collecting missions made an imprint on the postwar world of books and information. The OSS and military efforts to acquire open-source intelligence propelled advances in library and information science already underway. A number of those involved in wartime acquisitions became pioneers in this field. The program of acquisition offered a prototype for open-source intelligence gathering after the war. These missions also contributed to a growing orientation among American libraries toward internationalism, in which collecting foreign holdings was deemed essential to American power. For the most part, however, the collections themselves attracted little notice. With the Holocaust awareness of the late twentieth century, the acquisition of looted Jewish books was investigated by the Justice Department and President Bill Clinton’s Commission on Holocaust Assets. Looted and displaced books remain part of the unfinished business of World War II.

Fugitive Records of War

Although most research libraries accepted their reliance on the government-sponsored Library of Congress Mission, the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace did not. Its founder Herbert Hoover used the influence and reach of a former president to enable a private institution to operate where others were barred. Although eventually the Hoover Library won an authorized spot on the LCM, it largely operated in the shadows of the American military government. It drew upon an overlapping informal network of collectors, war correspondents, and intelligence agents to operate within the gray market for information in a defeated nation. These operations briefly came under scrutiny when one acquisition, The Goebbels Diaries, was published. Despite that episode, the library’s wartime collecting mission hastened the growth and prominence of the Hoover Institution as a center for the study of global politics, war, and diplomacy.

The Wild Scramble for Documents

Intelligence gathering and assessment took on increased importance after D-Day. OSS librarians and information specialists were now part of a military operation as members of US Army documents teams called T-Forces. They scoured targets for operational or strategic information, records documenting German war crimes, and scientific reports. Books and other publications were often swept up in these collecting efforts. POW interrogations provided information about the removal of endangered German collections, many of which were found by Allied troops in caves and mines. The army teams and OSS agents engaged in mass confiscations and removals, even of materials with few intelligence-related uses. Americans distinguished their behavior from Nazi pillaging and Soviet trophy loot, respecting university and public research libraries and rescuing European cultural heritage. Despite ethical questions, the logic of collecting extended to books, periodicals, and even whole libraries.

The Country of the Mind Must Also Attack

With war imminent, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, soon to be head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forged a new relationship between libraries and America’s nascent intelligence service. Their urgent call for foreign information was a response to the international crisis, but it was also a culmination of larger changes in American libraries, academia, and cultural institutions. A new sense of purpose had arisen in the interwar years, characterized by national ambition and internationalist commitment. New ideas about organizing and accessing information challenged the traditional book. The Nazi attack on knowledge and culture intensified concerns about preserving, reproducing, and accessing materials. These developments would be yoked to an emergent intelligence apparatus and commitment to open-source collecting as a way to know the enemy. With the outbreak of war, MacLeish and Donovan devised a plan to send American librarians abroad to acquire foreign publications.