Kibre is one of many memorable characters who appear in two new books about stealing and destroying knowledge in wartime: Peiss\u2019s Information Hunters:<\/em> When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe<\/em>\u00a0and Richard Ovenden\u2019s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge<\/em>. As both works show in rich and sometimes horrifying detail (and to paraphrase Robert Darnton), books do not just reflect upon history; books create history.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n On this point, Peiss quotes the poet Archibald MacLeish. As Librarian of Congress during the Second World War, MacLeish recruited scholars to a branch of the OSS\u2014Research and Analysis, nicknamed the \u201cChairborne Division\u201d\u2014where they read and worked up strategic analyses from the very documents that Kibre found and photographed: \u201cThe keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare,\u201d MacLeish explained. \u201cThe keepers, whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Books do not just reflect upon history; books create history.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The documents that filled out the collections of the Institute and its sister organizations\u2014like the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, a commission for looting art and texts\u2014came, in part, from the compelled labor of Jewish scholars, who were forced to identify their own cultural treasures in the holdings of libraries and synagogues. In 1941, for example, after the German army captured the Lithuanian city of Vilna\u2014which held \u201cone of Europe\u2019s richest collections of Jewish books\u201d\u2014Dr. Johannes Pohl, a Nazi and book curator who helped to lead the Rosenberg Taskforce, \u201crealised that only Jewish specialists could undertake the task of identifying key materials. He therefore ordered the ghetto to provide him with twelve workers, to sort, pack, and ship materials, and appointed a team of three Jewish intellectuals to oversee the work: Herman Kruk, Zelig Kalmanovitch and Chaikl Lunski. The Jewish guards of the ghetto called the group the \u2018Paper Brigade.\u2019\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The Paper Brigade resisted their task using every stratagem they could. They knew that selecting a small group of texts for preservation meant consigning the other texts to destruction. (\u201cThe Jewish porters occupied with the task are literally in tears,\u201d Herman Kruk wrote at the time; \u201cit is heartbreaking to see this happening.\u201d Later, referring to the city\u2019s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, he wrote, \u201cYIVO is dying; its mass grave is the paper mill.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup>) They slowed their work as much as they could be seen to do, and slowed it still further when their German supervisors were absent. They smuggled books home to the ghetto, concealing the bulk under their shirts and trousers. By the fall of 1943, Ovenden writes, \u201cthousands of printed books, and tens of thousands of manuscript documents, made their way back to the Vilna Ghetto thanks to the astonishing, risky, and dangerous biblio-smuggling of the Paper Brigade.\u201d<\/p>\n The poet Abraham Sutzkever, one of the smugglers in the Paper Brigade, acquired a permit to carry home scrap paper to light the ghetto\u2019s ovens. What he really carried home were treasures to be saved: letters, diaries, drawings, books. A poem he wrote in 1943, \u201cKerndlekh Veyts\u201d (Grains of Wheat), imagines a day when these texts\u2019 intended readers would be able to read them in the open: \u201cAnd I dig and plant manuscripts \/ \u2026 Perhaps these words will endure, \/ And live to see the light.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Ultimately, most of the workers for the Paper Brigade were murdered. Even so, you can visit many of the documents that Sutzkever and others saved in archives in New York City.<\/p>\n During those same years, Maria Josepha Meyer\u2014an American who had worked before the war for the publisher Hachette in Paris\u2014worked on behalf of the Library of Congress in occupied France. Meyer\u2019s job was to gather sensitive texts, especially underground literature and titles on the constantly updated lists of banned books, before the occupying German forces could seize them. She sent reports of raids on bookstores to Archibald MacLeish, which he passed on to President Roosevelt.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Adele Kibre ran a document-gathering operation in Stockholm that was so effective that it drove her superiors a little crazy. Nobody could figure out her methods. She sent to Frederick Kilgour, her superior in London, photographs of underground newspapers, of technical manuals, of government statistics, of air raids in Estonia and sabotage by the Resistance in Denmark. She sent photographs of Industrie-Compass 1943<\/em>, a German manufacturing directory that the Nazis had locked down because it held \u201cinformation of value to the enemy and therefore of interest to spies.\u201d<\/p>\n Kilgour begged Kibre to reveal how her operation found these items: \u201cDo they indulge in any underground work or is everything obtained through ordinary bookstore channels? I wish that sometime you would write me a very garrulous letter describing the set-up in Stockholm and the people with whom you work.\u201d Kibre never answered.<\/p>\n As Peiss suggests, Kibre\u2019s methods were likely, when considered in the context of library collections and acquisitions, quite mundane. Yes, rumor had it that she sometimes stole into occupied France on a fishing boat. But she also made herself a favored customer at local bookstores, made friends with local scholars, and obtained borrowing privileges from lenders that included Sweden\u2019s Royal Institute of Technology, a civil statistics office, and a medical-school library. She subscribed to a lot of newspapers. She worked every source she could: for example, she was on good terms with the Norwegian underground, and her own notes suggest that she schmoozed with a Nazi propaganda minister in order to procure valuable documents. The Nazis hid whole libraries\u2019 worth of literary treasures, just as they had hidden paintings and statues stolen from Jewish owners.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n After the war, document hunters sought to recover stolen treasures, to gather information that would support the new mission of denazification, and to help future historians make sense of the horrors in Europe. Max Loeb\u2014a US Army private, refugee from Nazi Germany, and former book publisher\u2014won renown as a brilliant interrogator of \u201cprisoners of war knowledgeable about libraries, publishing, and the book trade.\u201d<\/p>\n In his interviews, Loeb learned about hundreds of sites that the US military could target to find useful documents, and about much more besides. The director of Research and Analysis in Europe praised his ability to pile discoveries on discoveries: \u201cFrom the outset, it became apparent that he was obtaining \u2026 information on personalities, relocation of government and party headquarters, and industrial targets far beyond the scope of his immediate interest.\u201d<\/p>\n In the process, Loeb learned the locations of literary treasures\u2014whole libraries\u2019 worth\u2014that the Nazis had hidden, just as they had hidden paintings and statues that they had stolen from Jewish owners, in castles, monasteries, salt mines, and caves. One POW explained that German military engineers had dug a system of tunnels for this purpose near the Mosel River. Another recited the location of a chain of sites that hid stolen valuables; he had helped his father to string telephone wires between them. If you liked The Monuments Men<\/em>, you\u2019ll like this book.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Peiss\u2019s and Ovenden\u2019s books are at once too much and too little, in a good way. Information Hunters<\/em>, at 291 densely packed pages, covers its subject matter thoroughly; at times, you can almost picture the author tipping boxes of archival notes onto the page.<\/p>\n But no book can include everything, so the analysts who made use of the documents that Kibre and her colleagues tracked down rarely appear as characters. We also see glimpses of figures\u2014like Sherman Kent, the father of modern intelligence analysis\u2014whose importance to the world of intelligence receives no mention, presumably for lack of space. And readers hoping for a thriller in the vein of the late John le Carr\u00e9 won\u2019t find one here. (That doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t inspire one. I beg the creatives out there to read these books, and write a dramatic miniseries about bookish spies during the Second World War.)<\/p>\n Burning the Books<\/em> addresses the whole history of book destruction in the West. This ranges from the military destruction of a great library in Nineveh in the seventh century BC through the British attack on the Library of Congress during the War of 1812 to digital attacks on archived datasets today. The book opens with a bonfire in Berlin in May 1933, in which a band of students burned thousands of books from an academic library in front of a whooping mob of 40,000 people; it ends with a warning that to this day, the destruction of knowledge is often used for political ends: \u201cthe preservation of knowledge is fundamentally not about the past but the future.\u201d<\/p>\n For Ovenden, the imperative to preserve libraries draws moral force from the memory of oppressors who have tried to obliterate all memory of the oppressed: \u201cNazi attacks on Jewish and \u2018un-German\u2019 literature were a warning sign of their policy of genocide against the People of the Book.\u201d<\/p>\n That framing seems right. So much of the modern discipline of book history\u2014the moral urgency, the desire to recover lost worlds from the documents those worlds left behind, the libraries in the United States and elsewhere that rose to world-class status by acquiring materials confiscated in wartime, the structures of attention and funding within what the historian Arno Mayer and others have called \u201cthe military-industrial-academic complex\u201d\u2014derives from the legacy of the Holocaust and the Second World War, as both Peiss and Ovenden note.9<\/a><\/sup> (Ovenden describes his encounter with YIVO\u2019s archives of rescued books and manuscripts in New York City\u2014which include documents that the Paper Brigade rescued\u2014as \u201cone of the most extraordinary\u201d experiences of his research.)<\/p>\n Today, as we deal with questions that concern the restitution of stolen cultural treasures<\/a>, the decolonization of the archive, the tenuous preservation of knowledge in digital and \u201chybrid\u201d archives, the creation of banned-book lists that may include both books that preserve the best of humanity and books that encourage the worst, the lessons of this chapter of library scholarship and book history remain as pertinent as ever. The keeping of records remains itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.<\/p>\n This article was commissioned by Leah Price<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n In Nazi Europe, countless books were banned. So those who saved books\u2014whether university archivists or Jewish scholars\u2014became smugglers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":42110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1051,14,603,33,1103,305],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1144],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-42097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-harvard-university-press","tag-history","tag-history-of-the-book","tag-nonfiction","tag-oxford-university-press","tag-world-war-ii","section-print-screen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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\nAs Ovenden describes, the Nazi government\u2019s destruction of Jewish books relied, in part, on the guidance of the so-called Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. This \u201cquasi-academic body\u201d premised its authority to adjudicate the fate of Jewish writings on its own \u201cmassive collection of books and Hebrew or other Semitic languages and books about Judaism.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/21394517746_abb4e33718_k-1000x600.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n The Spy Who Read Me<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
![\"Katherine](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Voyles-headshot-e1549579143361.jpg\")
<\/a>\n \n Katherine Voyles <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n
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\nEugene Power\u2014a microfilm expert who had given Kibre\u2019s name to the OSS as a promising recruit\u2014later explained his recommendation. What Power pointed out was that Kibre had been using archive hunting to satisfy a taste for intelligence gathering: \u201cI recalled that she liked to talk about international intrigue and espionage \u2026 . She was a real Mata Hari type.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup> It was no coincidence that, when war broke out and Mata Hari types were needed, so many were to be found walking around libraries.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/erika-7HHMaVFyWpM-unsplash-scaled-e1614726122716-1000x600.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/IMG_8320-2-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a>\n \n Ari Linden <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n