Published on 22 September 2016
When the US Army occupied Germany in September 1944 as one of the Allies, a separate programme was established for the return of cultural valuables to their original owners. It was called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section (MFAA) and several so-called collecting points were established in different places in Germany that were to receive and handle art, religious objects, archives, documents, books and other artefacts of cultural worth that the Nazis had seized and stolen from different people, organisations and communities. By 1946, there were four central depots left to handle these valuables in Munich, Wiesbaden, Marburg and Offenbach. The depot at Marburg was closed on the 15th June 1946 and the remaining depots received special tasks.
In 1945, the Allies found hundreds of mines and caves where the Nazis had hidden stolen goods from all over Europe. Money, gold, works of art and books were found here. The Third US Army found all the material Alfred Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab (ERR) had collected in a mine in Hungen. For the most part, what ERR had collected were Jewish religious objects, books and archives; but in addition, ERR’s own documents, archives, artworks and propaganda were also found in the mine at Hungen. The MFAA began to transfer this material to the Rothschild library in Frankfurt so that staff there would be able to assist in mapping/cataloguing the material. The task rapidly became too great for the Rothschild library and a separate, so-called collecting point was established in Frankfurt.
The Offenbach Archival Depot, which was located in the shut-down I.G. Farben, handled for the most part all Jewish religious objects, books and archives that ERR had collected since 1940. The material came from all over Europe. In addition to cataloguing European Judaism and collecting Jewish literature, they collected literature that belonged to freemasons, socialists, communists and other groups the Nazi’s perceived as enemies of the Third Reich. ERR had special groups for handling the enemies’ literature and cultural heritage in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Riga, Minsk, Kiev and Beograd.
ERR was headed by Alfred Rosenberg, known as Hitler’s ideologist. In 1939, he established an institute for the study of ‘the Jewish question’, Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage’, in Frankfurt. Here, Judaism was studied from an anti-Semitic point of view. The institute was to have been part of a college that Hitler and Rosenberg were planning, a college that was to have educated the elite of the Third Reich. It was therefore natural to have a research library rich in sources for the studies, and when Germany began its occupation of European countries in 1939, Rosenberg was allowed in with his own organisation, ERR, and collected research literature. And so, large amounts of Europe’s Jewish writings, libraries and religious objects ended up in Frankfurt.
In addition to Rosenberg’s plundering of Europe’s cultural heritage, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, regularly seized ‘the enemy’s literature’. In Berlin, a large research library was established to supply the SD with information about the enemy by means of literature from Freemasons, Jews, communists and others. In many cases, Himmler and Rosenberg acted as competitors in each other’s activities; both organisations wanted the same material for their collections. Rosenberg collected for the elite of the future; Himmler collected for studies then and there. Parts of Himmler’s collections can have ended up in the Offenbach depot after the war.
The librarians, historians, archivists and curators that were called to work with the return of material from Offenbach, were also experts in the various subjects Rosenberg and Himmler had collected. Many of the experts came from the Jewish communities throughout Europe that had been plundered, destroyed and exterminated. The Americans promoted the Offenbach Archival Depot as a comprehensive counter-action, antithesis, to the crimes the Nazis had committed during the war. Those who worked in the depot can tell of the huge piles of material that were to be organised. To begin with, a thorough cataloguing of the materials was done, but as time passed and the amount of work grew, sorting, photographing and making lists to obtain an overview of the provenance of individual materials prevailed. The objective was to send everything back to where it came from if this was possible.
"My first impressions of the Offenbach Collecting Point were overwhelming and amazing all at once. As I stood before a seemingly endless sea of crates and books, I thought what a horrible mess! What could I do with all these materials?" wrote Colonel Seymour J. Pomrenze reviewing his career as a “Monuments Man” in 1988. He also wrote that when he was assigned to Offenbach in February 1946, none of the material had yet been returned to the original owners. Colonel Pomrenze made note of his provenance research in binders so that today it is possible to see a detailed overview of what libraries and book collections were destroyed throughout Europe.
During 1946 and 1947, about 2.3 million books and 225,000 religious objects were returned to the original owners or to the country in which the books were found when they were seized. All together over 2.5 million objects were restored. Five European countries were the main recipients of this material: Germany, the Netherlands, France, the Soviet Union and Italy. In addition to this, the YIVO Institute in New York received 92,000 books and objects. The YIVO library, a Jewish library located in Vilnius before the war, which was completely destroyed during the war, recovered parts of is collection and was resurrected in a new form in New York. Other European countries regained or were gifted a lessor amount of books and objects.
A large part of the Jewish material was also loaned to various displaced persons’ camps in Germany. These housed many people, many practising Jews without their religious community and their writings. They were able to borrow Torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious objects. Thus many objects received new owners. Large parts of the Jewish material, books, manuscripts and religious objects, were transferred to the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization which received material where no sign of previous owners could be found. The organisation received material under the assumption that it would continue the work to restore all Jewish material, and to work to resurrect Europe’s Jewish culture. In 1950, the JCRO had received about 80,000 books and distributed them among about 25 different libraries. For the most part, it was the new centres for Jewish life in Israel and the USA that received these books. Thus the story shows how the books followed the people.
In addition to handling the books and other material from Europe’s Jewish community, the Offenbach depot also handled the Nazis’ own material. In the spring of 1946, it was decided to transfer part of this to the Library of Congress in the USA; there was a fear of theft or that it would be destroyed. Today, these documents are an important source of knowledge about the ERR’s work during the Second World War among other things.
Subsequently, it has been stated that in many cases it was difficult for the researchers at the Offenbach Archival Depot to differentiate between material that was looted and that which was not. In several cases in later years, further provenance studies have found books that should have been returned to previous owners. These were books that were transferred in the 1940s under the assumption that it would be impossible to return them. The Library of Congress has published exhaustive lists of this material that are available today.