Prague exhibition reveals how the Nazis sought to build the world’s largest Jewish book collection
Burned synagogues and smashed shop windows are some of the best-known images of Nazi persecution of Jews. But the Nazis also systematically confiscated Jewish books, hoping to build a huge collection that could be used to provide a ‘scientific’ justification for their racist ideology. During the war, more than half a million volumes were moved to the occupied Czech lands, where many remained for decades. An exhibition at the Klementinum in Prague, From the Shadows to the Light, now looks at what happened to these books and the efforts to uncover their stories.
I spoke to historians Jana Jirásková and Jiří Blažek, both from the Documentation Centre for Property Transfers of the Cultural Assets of WWII Victims, and began by asking them why the Nazis went to such lengths to collect Jewish books, and what they intended to do with them.
Blažek: "Well, the first stage of the Nazi persecution of Jews and their political opponents was demonstrated by burning books. But this autodafé, or book burning, which was conducted in Spain in the spring and summer of 1933, was merely a demonstration of power.
“The Nazis were very well aware” that the books had tremendous artistic value, but they also planned to use them “as a basis for their pseudo-scientific research."
"The assembling of books was a much more sophisticated and complicated process. The Nazis' intention was first to collect books, manuscripts and other artworks which had, and which still have, tremendous artistic value. The Nazis were very well aware of that.
"The second point, which we are trying to emphasise in our exhibition, is that the Nazis planned to use these books as a kind of propaganda tool and for the further education of Nazi elites, to show them, let's say, the evil of Jewish culture and Jewish religion. They were also planning to use these books as a basis for their pseudo-scientific research."
Who were they taking these books from? Were they targeting mainly private collectors, Jewish communities and Jewish institutions?
Blažek: "All of them. The books which were confiscated came from, for example, Rosenthaliana in the Netherlands and from the Jewish community of Vienna, which possessed a tremendous collection of wonderful Jewish manuscripts and books.
"The Jewish community of Munich also possessed a large collection of Judaica. And, of course, the library of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest was, and still is, home to one of the largest collections of Judaic and Hebraic literature in the world.
"Part of our exhibition also focuses on a large fund from the Jewish community of Olomouc. This communal library was relatively modest in comparison with the other libraries, but its books still somehow found their way into these Nazi collections."
You have already mentioned Vienna, Budapest, Olomouc, but also the Netherlands. How did these books end up in what is today Czechia?
Blažek "The Nazis collected these books in their institutions, most notably in Berlin, in the libraries of the RSHA [Reich Security Main Office]. But in 1943, they started an operation focused on evacuating these libraries to areas which were less endangered by Allied bombings.
"They were transporting books to various locations, in most cases castles, for example in Silesia and, in the case of the RSHA, to the area of the Czech lands, in the occupied Sudetenland, and also to the ghetto in Terezín.
"Unfortunately, this evacuation wasn't going very fast, so a large part of the Nazi-collected books burned in Berlin during the bombings in November 1943. But this is how these books ultimately ended up in the occupied Sudetenland and, after the war, in liberated Czechoslovakia."
Your team managed to trace the origins of many of these books. How did this search even begin? What prompted this search? And where does one even begin with such an investigation?
Jirásková: "The Documentation Centre assisted with the return of a book collection to Wroclaw. After that, the National Library asked us to help identify another book collection for which research had started but had not been completed, and for which no comprehensive inventory existed.
"The problem with provenance research is that it's always slightly different in each individual case, because you have to adapt to the situation.
"Generally, the first step is to make a basic survey of the entire collection. Ideally, this is followed by photographing the items, because it gives us, I would say, sources that are easy to work with and means that we don't have to handle the books themselves too much.
"Then we divide the items into those that bear identification features and those that do not. At first glance, this might seem simple. Usually, the identification marks are placed on the title pages of individual volumes, but this is not always the case.
"You then have to, so to speak, dig deeper and try to trace notes or other materials, such as labels or papers that were put into the individual volumes. And this is where we usually find the most interesting information."
Can you give us an example? Is it true that in some cases even a handwritten note found in a book helped you search the book's provenance?
Jirásková: "Yes, sometimes it does. But I would like to emphasise that provenance research is much more complicated. It is not as though we just turn up, open a book, find a library stamp, and the research is considered complete. The research is never complete.
"In some cases it is possible, especially if there is an ex libris or a library stamp. With handwritten notes, it's much more complicated, because if you don't have a signature in a book, you can't compare the handwriting, and you may never know who wrote the note in it.
"Also, you have to check the archives to find out whether this, let's say, probable owner was really the last one who had the book before it was stolen. The books may have been sold and passed to someone who didn't leave a mark in them.
"For me, for example, I don't sign or write in my books. So my library would be impossible to identify. This is the nightmare for provenance researchers.
"Another difficulty is reconstructing the routes taken by stolen items, and this doesn't apply just to books, but to all cultural assets. The records are rather difficult to work with, because many documents were destroyed during the war, either coincidentally or intentionally.
"And the surviving records are usually not precise inventories or lists of books. They may simply state that a certain number of crates were sent to Germany. But how many books were in those crates? What titles? Who was the owner? Was it one single collection, or scattered fragments of various collections?
"So there are many questions that arise."
What happens once, or what happened once, you succeeded in identifying the owner?
Jirásková: "Our institution is naturally also focused on assisting with the restitution of cultural assets seized from victims of the Second World War. We have a database on our website where we put all identified items.
"I'm pleased that scholars, people and foreign institutions now check it regularly and quite many items have already been returned.
"Essentially, we work as intermediaries between the institutions administering the identified property and the claimants. We don't physically return anything because we don't own it. Our role is to inform both parties and put them in touch with one another, but the real restitution process takes place between them.
"Of course, we are available to both parties throughout the whole process because many matters need to be clarified and verified. This is our job.
"But I would like to point out that restitution itself is not a simple or very quick process, because there are many legal requirements that need to be met. The institution needs to take care of this and, of course, needs to be sure that it is really returning the pieces to the rightful owner."
Could you share with us at least one or two really interesting stories that were hidden behind the books that you succeeded in identifying?
Blažek: "Most of the books we were able to identify belonged to institutions. But there is one small collection which was originally owned by Rabbi Joseph Bloch, an Austrian rabbi who lived in the late 19th century.
"He was also a representative in the National Assembly and was very interested in the fight against modern anti-Semitism, which was raising its head towards the end of the 19th century.
"His books were found among these collections. So this gives us kind of a personal touch that we are actually dealing with books which belonged to one concrete person and whose family had some very dramatic fate during the war."
How many books have you succeeded in identifying, and how many have you been able to link to their original owners?
Jirásková: "Well, the total number of volumes in this collection is almost 700, which is relatively small compared with the war-confiscated book collections, which numbered hundreds of thousands of books. So this is really just a fragment of those collections.
"We succeeded in identifying almost half of them. This includes books that belonged to institutions, libraries and one individual as well."
We are now meeting at an exhibition called From the Shadows to the Light, which showcases the results of your research. Does it mean that the investigation is over, or is it continuing? I imagine it can never really be over.
Blažek: "I hope we are only at the beginning right now, because with the cooperation of the National Library and the help of restoration workers, this research is becoming very interesting.
"Now we are really cooperating with experts in their fields, and we are able to discover more information about the original owners.
"And there are still some unanswered questions about how these books made their way into the National Library of Prague. What was their fate during the war? This is still a matter of assumptions and ideas, but we still need to find some definite answers."
What do we know about these books and their fate during the past decades between the end of the war and this exhibition? I mean, where were they? What happened to them during the communist regime?
Jirásková: "We don't know as much as we would like to, but we know that after the war there were many reports that castles in the former Sudetenland contained large numbers of books of unknown origin.
"The National and University Library, a predecessor of today's National Library, was tasked with processing these books. They transported them to Prague, sorted them and tried to identify their owners. Many volumes were returned to their countries of origin immediately after the war or in the immediate post-war years.
"But during the communist regime, there was no atmosphere for searching for Hebrew prints. So the Library basically returned to this work after the Velvet Revolution."
Finally, if I understand it correctly, this exhibition not only showcases the results of your research, it also focuses on the pre-war cultural life of Jewish communities. What do these books tell us about this life, about the richness of cultural life of Jews living in this country before the war?
Blažek: "It shows us that Jewish cultural life and the Hebrew printing industry was a thriving world, publishing thousands of books per year in tremendous numbers.
“The world of Hebrew book printing in Europe, which was completely lost during the Second World War, was a wonderful part of European cultural heritage which should not be forgotten."
"These books were dispersed all over Europe, and many of them were the result of incredibly hard work. We have to think that in those times, publishers of Hebrew books were not only dealing with printing machinery and similar things, but also with obtaining permissions from nobility, emperors, tsars and others.
"So publishing a book such as the Talmud or the Hebrew Bible with Jewish commentaries was not an easy task. It required a lot of political skills as well.
"We can also see that these publishing houses were very often competing against each other, and sometimes this competition was very tough. It was definitely not a fair economic competition like we are used to today.
"But ultimately, the world of Hebrew book printing in Europe, which was completely lost during the Second World War, was a wonderful part of European cultural heritage which should not be forgotten."
