Just when you think you know all the horrible things the Nazis did, there’s a new example. I really had no idea of the systemic destruction of 100s of years of Jewish, Polish, and other Slavic libraries as part of the Nazi attempt to erase everything they didn’t agree with. Very enlightening and moving book.

fascinating - VERY detailed... and dry.. but so interesting. The Nazis collected every library connected with Judaism - in order to study the history and "problems" of the Jewish people. Lots of interesting WWII info here.

Very detailed and moving.

A really excellent book and extremely well researched. Glad I read it!

Part of my issue is I was expecting something different. This is an academic text on collections of information on various projects to return books to the families of the original Jewish owners. It's not a story or an adventure. It's a document on efforts to return the books, with some history on how books turned up where they did.

There's been much interest lately in Nazi art looting stories as outlined in films like The Monuments Men. But I'd never heard of the Nazi looting of Europe's library - -and the immense scale of it.

Rydell travels around several cities, visiting libraries that were looted by the Nazis as part of a program to build their own institutes set up to study groups that they were intent on wiping out -- Jews, Freemasons and Communists. Sometimes these collections were recovered, but usually not, or were only partially retrieved. He visits (or describes) synagogue and Jewish community libraries in Amsterdam, Rome, Thessaloniki and Vilnius, as well as Russian and Polish libraries in Paris. World War II resulted in these collections being destroyed, scattered, left in warehouses and basements to rot, or "liberated" by allied powers and taken to North America or the Soviet Union. The scale is enormous, on the order of tens of millions of books, manuscripts and other documents.

There's a lot of detail about tracking collections as they were shipped around during and after the war, and a lot of discussion about the organization of the Nazi aperatus set up to find and disseminate books. But the part that brought me in were the personal interactions with librarians and scholars who are trying to put things right.

There are moments of real gut-wrenching emotion in this book, including the image of people in concentration camps, forced to sort pilfered volumes and running across their own books. Or a collection of books, owners unknkown, sent to Jewish communities in Canada after the war with a bookplate saying, "This book was once owned by a Jew, a victim of the great massacre in Europe."

In addition to libraries, individual book collections were also looted from homes. Rydell bookends this devastating history with a story about one these books and it's journey back to it's former owner's granddaughter. There are librarians out there trying to identify books in their collections that may have been acquired from this horrible event -- and trying to get them back to their owners or their descendants. There isn't much money for such programs, yet there are people out there still trying.

Kudos to Henning Koch who translated this from the original Swedish. It doesn't feel like a translated book at all.