Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.

Recently, I attended the 2017 MLA conference. There were several panels, more like hundreds and while some of them were a little dull, many of the ones I attended were awesome. One of the best was a panel about the destruction or taking of the libraries those a nation conquers. The focus was largely on the Israel/Palestine question in terms of those libraries (and the panel had to be hastily resembled apparently), but the points raised are good ones. Want to control or destroy a people, want to control a narrative? You must control the literature to do this. You must control access and literary as well.

It’s like art, and after all, literature is part of the arts.

Over the past several years, there have been various movies and books about the Nazis obsession with art. Usually that definition of art has been defined as the visual arts – paintings, sculptures - yet some writers, such as Lynn H. Nicholas do mention and go into some detail about the Nazis confiscating of the Torah. Outside of this, mention of the destruction of Jewish books, there has been little in general history, and perhaps just English, about the Nazis derive to get books, to raid libraries. Anders Rydell’s book, The Book Thieves, addresses this.

Rydell looks at the Nazi’s looting, not just of Jewish libraries, but of city and country libraries and archives. He also looks at those libraries that gained volumes, sometimes huge collections because of the circumstances of invasion and looting. The story starts as many book stories do – with a book that is at its heart a mystery. Any buyer or reader of a previously owned or used book, there sometimes is a mystery about the previous owner – an inscription, a bookplate, underlining – something that is a clue about the before. Rydell is part of returning this book to a descendant of the original owner.

The book itself traces not only the vanishing of private libraries but the battle to save and smuggle books to safety. The books in danger include religious works, fiction, and old manuscripts. The stories are at times inspiring - as the German librarians who are determined to trace the owners or their descendants of books that the library gain though less than moral means. At times the stories are depressing, such as the Italian library that lost its treasures and has yet to find them. There are the Dutch who brave death to save works.

Rydell’s book adds another and important layer to the history of the Nazi attack on culture.

I knew that the Nazis had burned books, but I was unaware of the book "collecting" that they had done. The Nazis went out of their way to not only exterminate the Jews, but also to create a strange homage to what they considered Jewish "backwardness". It only serves to drive home the hatred behind the act, that in addition to removing that people from the earth, they must preserve their memory as a museum of oddities in the form of pilfered libraries. The fact that thousands of these books still exist awaiting their owners fascinates me to no end.

Kiinnostava populaarihistoria sodan vähemmän tunnetusta puolesta. Osoittaa hienosti, kuinka natseille sota oli ideologista, ei vain strategista. Massiivisia resursseja käytettiin kirjastojen varastamiseen ja tuhoamiseen, aivan sodan viimeisiin päiviin asti. Kertoo myös kirjojen merkityksestä arjessa ja kulttuurissa, sekä hyvässä että pahassa.

Did you know that the Nazis looted books from all over Europe? I didn't either, which was why I decided to pick this book up. I wanted to read about why and how the Nazis went about looting books from various libraries, as well as the long-lasting impact on the population. The problem with this book, however, is that it front loads all the information you want to know in the first two chapters.

The following chapters are almost academic and highly detailed accounts of how each library was looted by the Nazis before and during WWII. Every chapter follows a similar structure: author visits a library, meets with a librarian, the librarian shares some of the books that they carry now, where those books came from, rinse and repeat. The author also goes to great lengths, and I mean GREAT lengths, to document the history around the library, the book collection, who was responsible for looting that particular library, which organisation he came from, what purposes were behind the looting, how he went about doing it, what Hitler thought about it, which librarians were in charge, etc. Halfway through the book and it all gets super tedious and repetitive. We are told that a tome about the history of Jews is supposed to be priceless and highly coveted by the Nazis. But because of the way these information are served up, it feels next to inconsequential. Look, if you tell me that everything is important, then nothing is. Plain and simple.

I was also hoping for a human side to the stories. Instead, we hear a lot of books but no owners. We hear a lot of Nazi leaders, but no victims. Instead of humanising this particular piece of history, which is little known to most, we are presented a record of all the important books that were stolen, but not whom the books were stolen from. Yes, they were stolen from the Freemasons, the Jews, the French, the Russians, etc — but who were they? Did they have names? What did the books mean to them? We get none of that information, which does make the tedium not worth the effort at all.

Very detailed and informative dive into the plundering of Jewish books and what happened to them after the war. I had heard that the Nazis collected art, books, jewelry - really anything of value - from their prisoners and had shipped it off to secret bunkers in the Third Reich, but this dives into how strategic they really were about it. As soon as the Nazis occupied countries, one of the first orders of business was to raid the libraries and take or eliminate culture and documentation. After the war, the plundering continued with the Soviets and tragically, much of what was lost was never returned. Stomach turning but fascinating all at the same time. What a time to be an archivist!

This sort of cultural loss is always so sad. I admire the librarians currently trying to return these books to their owners, when there are survivors or their families to return them to. I wish there was more political will to get this done, but the books aren’t worth as much money as stolen paintings.

"Robbing people of their words and narratives is a way of imprisoning them."

Sad, fascinating and gut wrenching story of the books plundered and destroyed by the nazis. At times hard to put down, other times harder still to read...

This is a long book, and it is not an easy one to read as it is about the horrors of the Holocaust, so enter at your own risk. This book focuses on the plundered books that the Nazis looted from libraries and private collections throughout Europe. Each chapter picks a 'focus' destination or library from France to Thessaloniki, Poland to Vilnius. No community was safe from the Nazis. It wasn't enough to murder the Jews and other marginalised communities like Communists and Freemasons; they had to take control of their history and culture too, erasing everything that made them unique and re-writing the narrative to suit them.

If you are interested in nonfiction and want to know more about the sorry fate of Europe's books during WWII, this is a really good deep dive into the topic. But beware – the horrific deeds of the Nazis are discussed, often in detail.

My favourite section was the paper mill of Vilnius (Lithuania), and the heroic deeds of the ghetto prisoners who went to great lengths to save, hide and smuggle as much Jewish literature as they could, complete with a hidden bunker, an outside smuggler, and James Bond-esque escape by airplane with books in tow.

CW: Death, murder, Holocaust, genocide, torture, violence, war, antisemitism, prejudice, cultural destruction.