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Documenting the Plunder of Judaica:
Perspectives from Remaining Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
Adolf Hitler’s ideological henchman Alfred Rosenberg was beheaded at Nuremberg, condemned
to death as a war criminal, the charges for which included the looting of cultural valuables by his
“Special Task Force,” namely the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). First organized in
France (June/July 1940), the ERR operated in all German- occupied countries. Their first
priorities were books and archives, especially from prominent Jews and Masons. Their loot was
quickly transported to Germany for Rosenberg’s Hohe Schule, its Central Library (ZBHS) and
the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question (IEJ) in Frankfort. In occupied Soviet lands, they
also found and shipped Judaica to IEJ, although there they concentrated on Bolshevik literature,
Orthodox icons, and archeological exhibits. Meanwhile in Western Europe through the MöbelAktion program, an ERR offshoot run by ERR staff to remove furnishing from vacated Jewish
lodgings, significant Judaica of all types was added to the ERR loot, including many more books.
My extensive (300pp.) international survey describing the remaining archives of the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and other records related to the fate of the ERR loot is
being launched later this summer on the website of the International Institute of Social History
(Amsterdam), with which I am affiliated, in cooperation with the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) and the Netherlands Institute of War
Documentation (NIOD). The project, long in preparation, describes ERR files in 28 repositories
in 9 countries. As a hybrid between a survey and an archival finding aid, for some repositories
not previously been publicly described, it presents more detailed file-level descriptions of ERR
documents and related materials. It also covers Hohe Schule and M-Aktion files as well as
restitution and postwar trial records (especially IMT) that have incorporated significant ERR
documents, as well as those related to the identification and restitution of the ERR loot.
The seizure of ca.20,000 works of art from over 200 private Jewish collections in France
and Belgium was the ERR’s most blatant claim to the status of war criminals. In the Art-Looting
Working Group, I have already mentioned the new database from the ERR inventories,
photographs, and registration cards for individual works they processed in the Jeu de Paume in
Paris. As part of the Claims Conference ERR project, the Jeu de Paume database is now being
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compiled at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and we hope for launch by autumn 2000.
Significant postwar restitution was possible because of those ERR documents survived, and we
plan to make the full texts available. This database, however, does not cover what most of you
would undoubtedly think of as Judaica. My own investigations on that subject have been
primarily devoted to libraries and archives.
In trying to find lost libraries, or even individual books, or to identify the provenance of
displaced ones that have been found, most essential is to know first, what Nazi agency plundered
them and second, where they ended the war. For books, the two principal plundering agencies
were the ERR and the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), and we need to understand the turf
wars between them. By the end of 1939, the RSHA already amalgamated the SD Hauptamt
together with the Gestapo, which was also a culprit in confiscation and/or trafficking of
Holocaust-related cultural goods. For confiscated books and archives, it was the RSHA Amt VII
that was the major destination repository.
Let me say a few words about each of four major concentrations of plundered books at
the end of the war. First, most has been written about the largest concentration of Jewish books
and ritual silver that ended the War in the Frankfurt area —in the ERR-supplied Institute for the
Study of the Jewish Question (IEJ), and its evacuation center in Hungen. In connection with my
ERR Survey, I recently found some of the ERR leases for more of the IEJ Hungen facilities, and
library correspondence from the IEJ library. The millions of books, archives, and other Judaica
recovered by the U.S. Army were all processed for restitution in the U.S. Central Collecting
Point outside of Frankfurt known as the Offenbach Archival Depot. Although predominantly
from ERR-plundered sources, some books plundered by the RSHA also were processed in OAD,
most numerous, part of the books from the RSHA Amt VII library that had been left in Berlin.
U.S. restitution records retain extensive documentation, including lists of libraries, albums of
library stamps and other markings and ex libris for the books processed for restitution there.
There are inventories of the ritual silver and other Judaica that were subsequently moved from
OAD or Munich CCP to the Wiesbaden CCP before being turned over to Jewish Successor
Organizations.
Second, the counterpart concentration of ERR-plundered books destined for the Central
Library of Rosenberg’s Hohe Schule (ZBHS) ended the war in the remote monastery of
Tanzenberg (near Klagenfurt) in Austrian Carinthia. As I have written elsewhere, this third
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concentration of over 600,000 books was processed for restitution by the British. Extensive
records remain in the British National Archives (TNA), although I have not yet found the
originals of the ERR Paris library records the British reported finding there. Many books in
Tanzenberg were identified from Jewish collections in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands,
while many non-Jewish books were restituted to other countries, including the USSR. I have
recently seen lists of owners of books, and some lists of books returned to France, among the
French restitution records; those book restitution records are now split between the Quai d’Orsay
Archives (soon to reopen in La Courneuvre) and the Archives Nationales. Almost all of the
books found in Tanzenberg were seized by or on behalf of the ERR, except for some ‘purchased’
from special collections. The beginnings of a new French database cover many of the named
collectors.
In the ERR seizure of library and archival materials, we see major differences in patterns
of plunder in the West and on the Eastern Front. In occupied Soviet lands, in contrast to the
numerous important Jewish collections in Western and Southern Europe, the ERR was
principally involved with plunder of state institutions, rather than private collections. The ERR
shipped out to Frankfurt and later Hungen some important Jewish library books from Belorus
and Ukraine. They found more in the Baltic countries recently annexed to the Soviet Union, such
as those of the Jewish Research Institute (YIVO) in Vilnius. For ZBHS, rather than Jewish
collections they supplied an estimated 35,000 from former Russian imperial libraries for ZBHS
in Tanzenberg.
Since the mid-1930s, long before the ERR was established, as I have written elsewhere,
the SD had started amassing Judaica and Masonic collections from within the Reich, especially
after Kristallnacht (November 1938). As the Third Reich extended its brutal occupation regime,
the SD, together with the Gestapo, which had by then been amalgamated into the Reich Security
Main Office (RSHA), had their hands out everywhere for important Judaica. By the end of the
war the Jewish, Masonic, and other divisions of the RSHA library, based on plundered
collections, greatly outnumbered those of the ERR. Thus the surviving ERR documentation I
have been surveying is only a partial wartime record of plunder of Judaica.
Researchers tracing the fate of books and archives from Jewish collections, or trying to
determine the provenance of surviving books and archives or other Judaica far from home will
accordingly also need remaining records of the RSHA. Many more of the relevant RSHA records
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are today concentrated in the Bundesarchiv record group (Bestand) R 58 than is the case of ERR
records. Because the RSHA was not seriously involved in art looting, SD seizure files are not
found mixed in with the postwar Western Allied restitution records I describe, while there are
many important ERR documents there.
Another crucial factor is that the most relevant RSHA records ended up in Eastern
Europe. Indeed, many surviving records from the RSHA Amt VII, the division that ran the
RSHA plundered library and archival operations were found (together with the looted archives)
in Silesia by the Red Army, or by the Poles at the end of the war. One major part of the RSHA
(and earlier SD Hauptamt and Gestapo) archives describing their plunder, captured by the Poles,
became available after 1989; that segment was turned over to the Bundesarchiv in a 1997
exchange.
An even more important segment had been captured by Soviet authorities. Some of those,
however, had been passed on to the Stasi in East Germany, and have been gradually becoming
available in the Bundesarchiv with the processing of the Stasi archives. Those contain many files
documenting SD-Hauptamt seizures, especially those in 1938 and 1939. In recent years, the
Bundesarchiv has been uniting all of the RSHA records in a database developed in BerlinLichterfelde and Hoppegarten, although it still is not detailed enough for optimal access.
However, that is much more accessible than another large segment of RSHA records that
remain sequestered in two large fonds in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) in
Moscow (from the former Special Archive). Their existence in Moscow is an impediment to
research, and the new Russian WW2 cultural property nationalization law (1998-2000) has
meant that they cannot be returned to Germany and reunited in the Bundesarchiv (R 58) with
the much larger batches of RSHA returned from the United States (1960s) and Poland (19979),
and those from East German after 1989.
Together with those in Berlin the Moscow RSHA files were the source of my description
of the German capture of archives and libraries in Western Europe, mentioned in my
introduction to the volume Returned from Russia. While that volume concentrates on the return
of the twice plundered Western European archives, the same sources are important in tracing
other cultural property, and especially Jewish library books.
Among those returned, the RSHA Amt VII had amassed particularly large collections of
archives from Jewish communities and other Jewish organizations from all over Europe, which
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the Red Army found and shipped off to Moscow afterwards, as well as Masonic lodges from all
over Europe. For that loot were often in bitter competition with the Einsatzstab Rosenberg
(ERR). Competition for the spoils explains why the archives from the Jewish Community of
Thessalonica are still now dispersed in several different countries including the United States,
Russia, and Israel. Last August Dutch archivists returned some files to Thessalonica that had
mistakenly been returned from Moscow to The Hague; those were the first that had been
returned to Thessalonica since the war. The ERR also seized important Judaica and Hebraica in
the former Yugoslavia, and Italy; reports from Yugoslavia are found in Moscow and New York
(YIVO) with copies of the latter in Berlin.
Another example of a serious research problem from dispersed records, has been my
trying to piece together documentation in Moscow and Berlin about the post-1943 fate of the
major portions of the RSHA Amt VII library. That third major concentration of plundered
library books—with an estimated million volumes—ended the war in evacuation (from Berlin)
in four Sudeten Castles and Theresiesenstadt concentration camp (Terezin, which we will visit
Tuesday), as described in my recent article published here in Prague. Leading Hebrew scholars
who were inmates were used for cataloguing Hebraica there, as well described in published
literature. The Red Army liberated Theriesenstadt, and the Sudenten castles where the other
books were located, but I have found no evidence that they captured any of the Jewish books
found there. The Poles managed to retrieve a train-wagon full of Judaica and Hebraica from
Poland even before the castles had been emptied and the remains brought to Prague.
We now estimate about 70,000 Jewish and Hebrew books went to Jerusalem, or were
sold to Jewish booksellers from Prague immediately after the war. Others were returned to at
least ten countries, which I am now trying to document in more detail. Some additional ones
remain in the custody of the Czech National Library, and probably another 200,000 remain in
the Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP). A database today in JMP is a major step forward in
identifying the provenance of books remaining from the concentration of plundered Jewish
books in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, as represented on our panel here. Those books
came primarily rom the RSHA Amt VII library and the SD Hauptamt exploits during the late
1930s.
I have earlier written in considerable detail about a fourth major concentration of books at
the end of the war, namely the estimated two million books and periodicals collected in the ERR
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operational center in and around Ratibor (now Polish Racibórz). Operations there, including with
the ZBHS Buchleitstelle, started in the summer of 1943, after Goebbels ordered evacuation of
Berlin. Ratibor also became the destination for most of the books the ERR plundered from the
former Soviet Union, as well as many from the Balkans, intensifying with German retreat from
the Eastern Front starting in the summer of 1943. We can now also determine the roads to
Ratibor (Polish Racibórz) for books from Western Europe, together with those plundered from
the USSR. The vast majority of them, and particularly those plundered from the Soviet Union,
were never processed and never reached their intended destinations.
The fact that roads from East and West converged in the ERR Silesian centre determined the
postwar road to Minsk for an estimated 1,200,000 volumes in the autumn of 1945. Half a million of
those books had first been confiscated from ‘enemies’ of the Nazi regime in France, the Benelux
countries, and former Yugoslavia, along with another half million plundered from libraries in
Belarus and other Soviet republics. Found by Red Army trophy brigades in the spring of 1945 in
warehouses in a Kattowitz (now Polish Katowice) suburb, 54 freight cars were shipped to Minsk.
However, the full documentation about their retrieval and that shipment in the fall of 1945 is still
classified in the Russian Ministry of Defense Central Archive (TsAMO) in Podolsk. Others books
and archives from Ratibor fell into Polish hands, part of which were restituted to the Netherlands
and Belgium in 1956.
The vast majority of those books spent the next half century imprisoned in Soviet Secret
Reserves (Spetskhran) in Minsk. In the fall of 2003 in Minsk, I learned that some of the Jewish
and Hebrew books were still uncatalogued. Thanks to provenance cataloguing undertaken since
1992 in the Rare Books Department of the National Library, I was able to match up book
markings and dedications with close to one hundred names of confiscated “Jewish libraries” on
ERR lists from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands that I had brought with me to Minsk.
Perhaps these ERR lists of confiscated libraries could supplement the new database compiled on
French library seizures by Martine Poulain, now on a Paris website. In Minsk to name only three
names from those lists, I found books from my the Amsterdam institute (IISH), books seized in
Belgium belonging to Frederich Adler (1876–1960–), secretary of the Second International, and
elegant volumes owned by various members of the Rothschild clan. Those are only a few
examples seized by the ERR from victims of the Holocaust in Western Europe, but librarians in
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Minsk still consider those books as “compensation” for the millions of books plundered or
destroyed in Belarusian libraries during the war.
My ERR archival survey is now serving as the basis for a virtual ‘reconstruction’ of
remaining ERR files, together with a detailed finding aid, in cooperation with the German
Bundesarchiv. Plans call for consolidation of dispersed ERR documents in a searchable digital
system as a major component of the record of wartime cultural plunder. Of considerable interest
here, my survey also describes briefly additional documentation relating to postwar efforts to
locate, identify, and return those items to their home country. We need a separate workshop to
discuss methodology, other priority archives to be made available, and perspectives I have
gained in tracking down related ERR seizure documents. Growing out of my experience with
this ERR project, I have a number of recommendations for further international research
cooperation. Most of all we need to cooperate with the new joint international project of archival
leaders from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to extend more
Internet access to important groups of sources relating to Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural
Property, as announced in the Art Looting Archival Panel at this conference. And we also need
to pool the findings of specialists from individual museums and libraries that have been
searching for their own still displaced valuables.