Published on 23 September 2016
From when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, books were both burned and taken care of. Book burnings were symbolic; taking care of them was done to study the Nazi’s political enemies; Gegnerforschung. Heinrich Himmler, the head of SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief ideologist, both saw to it that books belonging to the enemies were taken care of throughout the war years. Both Himmler and Rosenberg were responsible for the establishment of large research libraries in Berlin and Frankfurt, which later would be moved and end up in what today is known as Poland and the Czech Republic.
In 1931, Himmler employed Reinhard Heydrich in a position to conduct research on the Nazi party’s opponents. These activities were later developed to become the SD and then extended to collect “subversive books”; this consisted of literature and other objects that could throw light on the enemy’s activities. A library was established and people hired to catalogue and research the enemy’s literature. The research was disseminated in propaganda in the form of book publications and exhibitions as a warning to the population.
In 1934, the SD had its headquarters in Munich and a library that was to form the basis for the central library in Berlin. This was a separate library for the Reichsführer’s SS that almost exclusively dealt with Masonic literature. All Masonic lodges in Bavaria had their books seized in addition to the collections that were found at the Deutsches Freimaurermuseum [German Freemason Museum] in Bayreuth. These were brought to the RFSS SD library in Munich. When the SD’s headquarters were moved to Berlin, the library was moved as well. From 1935 and onwards, Himmler ordered the collection of all political literature designated “harmful and undesirable”. This comprised literature concerning Judaism, Hebraica, liberalism, pacifism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, sexology, anthropology, the occult, Masonic literature, political churches, sects and everything else critical of Nazism.
It was seen as a threat to the Party and to the State that people had other thoughts and opinions, and the largest groups of enemies were the Jews, Freemasons and communists, followed thereafter by a number of minor religious and political organisations. By closing and looting the various libraries that were linked to these groups in society, the SD achieved several things: they removed the material from the public and established their own research library with the same material, as well as acquired large estates and assets such as buildings and historical artefacts. In Berlin, the building where the German Order of Freemasons [Große Landesloge der Freimaurer von Deutschland) was located in Eisenacher Strasse in Berlin, was requisitioned and used as the central library for RSHA. Here, for example, Jewish forced labourers worked with the Jewish material that was collected.
In 1936, the term “central library” was used for the first time. All politically undesirable written material from the entire country was to be sent to a newly created academic central library in Berlin. Boxes of books were sent from Masonic lodges throughout the country and the transport costs were provided by liquidating the Masonic lodges. The Nazis had the victims pay for the shipments of their own literature. Throughout the spring of 1936, the Gestapo collected written material from socialist organisations and special academic collections dealing with sexual information. In 1937, they looted the so-called political churches. After Anschluss in 1938, there were new, sizeable book collections to gather in Austria; the Nazis looted socialist, Jewish and other academic libraries in the neighbouring country. In 1938, the “November action against Judaism” was carried out; all Jewish property was to be registered and the libraries that were not to be taken care of were to be destroyed in the Crystal Night pogrom. Seventy (70) large book collections from the Jewish Theological Rabbinical Seminaries in Berlin, Breslau, Hamburg, Dresden, Munich and Frankfurt were seized.
In 1939, the SD and State police / the Gestapo carried out collecting under one department, Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA, with Reinhard Heydrich as its head. In this merger, all the book collections from various Jewish institutions and organisations were gathered together in one collection that was headed by Franz Alfred Six, who had a PhD in philosophy and had taught at the University of Königsberg. Six was not only the head of the library, but also head of the RSHA Amt VII’s section for research on the enemies of the Reich. He was to develop the central library and a museum, and run the academic research. His projects were directly linked to the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Six was followed by Paul Dittel, a sworn anti-Freemason, in 1943. The RSHA’s central library in Berlin housed between two and three million books at the most.
When war and battles intensified during the 1940s, academics studying the enemy had to give up their research and were sent into battle. The research activities were wound up to be replaced by the machinery of war. When the Allies intensified bombing of German towns in 1944, the RSHA feared for the wealth stored in Berlin and other German towns and began moving archives and libraries to the outer borders of the Third Reich. The archives were for the most part moved to Silesia (now in Poland) and the books to Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic). About 500,000 books remained in the central library in Berlin and were afterwards distributed among the various libraries in Berlin where they can be found today.
In Sudetenland, the books were mainly stored in four different castles. After World War II, large collections were recovered from the castles, but large quantities were also left in storage there for as long as up to the 1980s. The National Library then transferred the collections to an abandoned chemical plant in Neratovice, half an hour’s drive from Prague. The books have been stored there since, and mixed in with other collections of books, among others those seized under the Communist regime from 1948 and until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Only now have many of these books been retrieved for the first time since the war in the project “Books discovered once again”.