 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and I'm pleased that you could join us for this afternoon's program. Whether you're here in the theater with us or joining us through Facebook or YouTube, a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Before we hear from Kathy Pice about her new book, Information Hunters, I would like to tell you about two other programs coming up soon here in the McGowan Theater. At 7 p.m. tonight we'll host a screening of One Woman, One Vote in honor of the 25th anniversary of that PBS documentary. The film documents the 70-year struggle for women's suffrage that's culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment. Next Thursday, January 30th, at 7 p.m. we'll show a special 90-minute compilation of a new three-part PBS series, A More or Less Perfect Union, U.S. Appellate Court Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg will introduce the screening and take audience questions afterward. To keep informed about events throughout the year, check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater and you'll get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives activities and programs. Another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The foundation supports all of the work of our education and outreach activities. Check out their website at archivesfoundation.org to learn more about them. During World War II, getting the correct information was critical to the American War effort. While we might first imagine spies sneaking stolen secrets out of occupied countries, much useful information was found in published sources and books, newspapers, and other documents. Kathy Pyce's latest book explores how the quest for information led to the recruitment of librarians, scholars, and archivists for this important war work in Europe. Information gathering was a natural role for librarians and archivists who were skilled in collecting and organizing books and documents. Their work in the war years has left its own archival trail that Pyce and other scholars can now follow. Through a number of research collections, Pyce herself sifted through the OSS and State Department records here at the National Archives in College Park and at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa. Researchers today pursue their missions in research rooms and online relying on the skills of archives and library professionals. And I'm very proud of our staff here at the National Archives and the daily work they do to assist the modern information hunters. Kathy Pyce is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on modern American cultural history and the history of American sexuality, women, and gender. She's the author of Chief Amusements, Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century, New York, Zoot Suit, the enigmatic character and extreme style, and Hope in a Jar, The Making of America's Beauty Culture, which was the finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and named one of Amazon's 1999 top 100 books and women's studies. Pyce is a fellow of the Society of American Historians and serves on the Society Executive Board. In addition to writing and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and public history projects. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kathy Pyce. Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here, and I need to give a very strong note of thanks to the National Archives, not only for inviting me, but much more importantly for its collections and its extraordinary archivists. I could not have written this book without the National Archives, and so I am deeply grateful. We know the big stories of World War II, of combat, courage, death, and destruction, the complex decision making behind military decisions and foreign relations, and the reshaping of global geopolitics after the war. In recent years, we have also come to appreciate the unusual alliance between the cultural world and the battlefield during World War II, especially the American curators and museum specialists who saved art and culture in wartime Europe, the monuments men, a unique unit of the American military during the war. But there are still many hidden stories on the margins of battlefields that shed light on the war and its broad impact on American life, and this is one of those stories. It was revealed to me unexpectedly when I stumbled upon a memorial to my father's oldest brother, Ruben Pice, who died in 1952 at age 40. I learned for the first time about his surprising life about 16 years ago. He was the eldest son in a Jewish immigrant family, received scholarships from Trinity College and Harvard University to study philosophy. He taught in a WPA funded community college in the midst of the Great Depression and then earned a library degree. He was a librarian at Harvard at the outset of the war when he was recruited into the office of strategic services, the wartime intelligence agency to acquire enemy publications abroad. At the end of the war, he headed a mission of the Library of Congress to obtain all works published in Germany and occupied countries for American libraries. I spent many hours tracing his life and work, not thinking that a book would eventually result from it. The process of uncovering his story was a remarkable one for me. I never met Ruben Pice. He died before I was born. But his life became an integral part of mine for many years. And his story led me to the information hunters, an unlikely band of American librarians, archivists, scholars, spies and soldiers whose war effort centered on books and documents. They gathered enemy publications in the spy-ridden cities of Stockholm and Lisbon, searched for records in liberated Paris and the rubble of Berlin. They seized Nazi works in bookstores and schools and unearthed millions of books hidden in German caves and mine shafts. Improvising the techniques of librarians in wartime conditions, they contributed to Allied intelligence, safeguarded endangered collections, and restituted looted books. And they built up the international holdings of American libraries. These men and a few women came together in a series of mass collecting efforts that originated in the unique conditions of World War II. And I think they offer a contrast or a compliment to the monuments men, which was an army unit that grew out of a presidential commission dedicated to the cultural protection of heritage in war zones. Books, I think, are less straightforward than art treasures. And many different decision makers and personnel address the problems they posed and their potential to aid the war effort. So just a word about books. It's worth recalling that books serve readers in many different ways. Their sources of useful information, their forms of communication, their material or physical objects, and they are a record of cultural heritage. In a total war, these general attributes became terrains of battle. More than in any previous war, World War II required the mobilization of knowledge to fight the enemy. The war's ideological confrontations sharply contrasted freedom and fascism, which were played out often in the realm of books, propaganda, and mass media. And the uprooting and pillaging destruction of culture through armed conflict and the Third Reich's intentional policies drew new attention to preserving the records of civilization in a time of war. So each of these elements brought together American librarians and scholars, soldiers and spies during the war and the immediate postwar period. The story begins with intelligence. So the U.S. government had only a limited capacity for foreign intelligence gathering on the eve of the war. The FBI kind of ramped up its compilation of dossiers on domestic threats, intercepted mail, American embassies reported on foreign developments. The armed services began to ramp up some of their military intelligence. But the U.S. was far beyond behind France and Germany in intelligence gathering. And as the international crisis mounted, President Roosevelt came to believe that the government needed a more robust intelligence capability. In July 1945, he appointed William Donovan, known as Wild Bill, a decorated World War I veteran lawyer and political operative, to build a civilian intelligence agency. This became known as the Office of Strategic Services. Initially, the agency, however, was called the Coordinator of Information. And I would just underscore that name because it was this new attention to information that led to these wartime collecting missions. They first focused on the prosaic task of gathering and analyzing non-secret publications and documents. And to do this, Donovan enlisted the help of Archibald McLeish, a kind of unlikely pair who spent a lot of time together. The famed poet playwright at the time, the Librarian of Congress. Under McLeish, the Library of Congress had become a site of a new government cultural alliance. He was an ardent interventionist and he urgently raised the stakes for librarians. He called on them not only to be custodians of culture, but also defenders of freedom. As he eloquently put it in 1940, as a quote, in such a time as ours, when wars are made against the spirit and its works, the keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they so wish or not, cannot be neutral. Strangely enough, the origins of America's vast intelligence apparatus might be traced to the meetings of these two men in the summer of 1941. We tend to think of intelligence in terms of the exploits of spies, secret operations, decoded messages, but publicly available information, open sources, were always important and, of course, remain important. Donovan and McLeish believed that intelligence could be gleaned from the close analysis of open sources using the methods and tools of scholarship which might reveal information useful for the war effort. For a newspaper, scientific periodicals, industrial directories, and the like were thus in great demand. The international book trade was shut down by the war and so other means of acquisition had to be found. And so not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they formed an agency that has a very unwieldy name, I'll only say it once, the interdepartmental committee for the acquisition of foreign publications known as the IDC. It was chaired by William Langer, a Harvard-based historian and the head of the OSS research and analysis branch. And it was run by 28-year-old Frederick Kilgore, whom Langer recruited from Harvard Library. And Kilgore, in turn, recruited my uncle Rubin into the OSS. He was 90 years old when I had the opportunity to meet him. He was still very sharp and perhaps had something of the habits of an intelligence agent. He had like selective hearing loss when he, there's a question he didn't want to answer. The acquisitions committee got off to a very slow start. They failed to acquire a single item in its first four months. Finally, in April 1942, they began to send librarians and scholars abroad to collect material. Initially, they thought they could get away with just one or two people. But the program rapidly expanded into Lisbon, Stockholm, London, Istanbul, Cairo, New Delhi and Chongqing. So I'm going to talk about the Stockholm and Lisbon operations. The Stockholm operation was headed by really the only woman to serve as a field agent in this project. Her name was Adele Kyber. She had an unusual background. She had grown up in Hollywood in a family connected to the film industry. But she had a very scholarly bent and went to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in medieval linguistics, which she earned in 1930. Like many women of her era, she was denied an academic career. Instead, she carried on her own research while employed by senior faculty at Chicago to go abroad and either copy or photograph rare books and manuscripts for their scholarship. At the Vatican Library in 1934, she began to observe scholars rapidly filming their research using small cameras. And she trained herself to do the same. She was in Germany when the war broke out. She participated in an air raid drill in a German library. She left Paris just ahead of the German invasion, made her way to Lisbon and then returned to the United States in March 1941. 18 months later, she returned to Europe, this time to Stockholm, to microfilm enemy publications for the OSS. She worked very closely with British intelligence, but she also developed her own channels of access through booksellers, through sympathetic librarians, through government agencies. And she also engaged in covert acquisitions. She made contacts with the Danish resistance and the clandestine press. And she worked with the British to smuggle technical periodicals into Sweden from Germany. There also are family stories that she was engaged in espionage along the coast of occupied France. I haven't been able to prove this in the National Archives records. Her personnel record in College Park contains only a single sheet of paper. So somebody rated it at some point. And she's still a woman of mystery. She was certainly the most secretive of the agents, frustrating her bosses who wanted her to send newsy letters and who thought she might be overwhelmed by the job. In fact, she was the most effective agent in the OSS acquisitions program by gathering sources, microfilming them, and relaying them to London. The other large operation was in Lisbon, in neutral Lisbon, where despite the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, book dealers and newsstands did a very brisk business in German and other periodicals from all over Europe. Lisbon was a magnet for intelligence agents from all the warring countries. And these included some American librarians, including Ruben Pice and Ralph Carruthers, who was a microfilm expert from the New York Public Library, and Manuel Sanchez, who was sent separately by the Library of Congress. Sanchez arrived first, and after shaking off some Portuguese undercover agents who were tailing him, he wound up being very successful purchasing works on the open market and also gathering secret materials. He was a dashing and popular figure at the Library of Congress, and he wrote these elaborate, wonderful letters back, calling his employer Elsie, or Elsie, and Sanchez, of course, portrayed himself as a character in a spy novel. His closest contacts were the Andrade brothers, owners of the Liberaria Portugal, who, bookstore I showed in the previous slide, who were Allied sympathizers who went with him to Franco's Spain, where they approached German-owned bookstores and acquired many works that would have been too dangerous for the Americans to collect on their own. The OSS agents, Carruthers and Pice, competed with Sanchez to collect their work, and they, too, made the rounds of bookstores, took buying trips into the hinterland, which is that photograph on the top left, and they cultivated sympathetic locals to loan secret items or be fronts for subscriptions. Initially, the OSS was given just an allotment of 165 pounds a month for air shipments, which was a very limited amount of very limited weight. So they microfilmed most of the material they acquired. Their camera equipment was located in the kind of out of the way room in the American consulate, and it was often going on day or night. I put on the slide this card that says H. Gregory Thomas just to show you the kind of remarkable sources you can find in the National Archives. This is a calling card. It is literally like a business card, very small, and it was the card of the head of the OSS in the Iberian Peninsula, Gregory Thomas, whose codename was Argus, which he sent with Ruben Pice to Alan Dulles to introduce him. Alan Dulles, of course, being the famous bymaster and head of the OSS in Bern, Switzerland. This was buried deep in an accordion file in the Bern Field Station records. The result was a massive and nearly overwhelming quantity of material. By the end of 1942, their first year, over one million pages had been duplicated and distributed to American government agencies, and the numbers continued to grow. By the end of operations, Kiber's unit alone produced 3,000 reels of microfilmed newspapers and periodicals. It is very difficult to gauge the intelligence value of these acquisitions. The committee claimed, of course, they were very valuable because they were appealing to the Bureau of the Budget to increase their budget. The operational uses of this material seem limited, certainly compared to signals, intelligence, or code breaking. Nevertheless, newspapers, scientific records, technical works, and the like directly from access in occupied countries could be mined for useful information. They could indicate enemy troop strength. They gave suggestions of new weaponry, levels of industrial production, transportation, and there are even ways to estimate enemy deaths by extrapolating from obituaries. So, again, the kind of skills of scholarship being applied to these materials. Many wartime officials also perceived open sources to be highly important, and they invested considerable energy analyzing them. To make these sources useful, techniques of information management had to be employed to transform the physical object, well, in this case, microfilm, of books and serials into the genre of intelligence. So, they extracted useful information, they indexed it, they provided abstracts, and they translated about 4% of all the material that they acquired into one of 42, you know, from 42 languages. So, this was quite an operation. Information, disaggregated content, not the publications themselves were the intelligence product. In a time before computers were not available for this work, the OSS hired a small army of indexers and translators. Most of them were women and emigres to carry this on. The OSS mission into neutral cities became less important after D-Day for obvious reasons. At that point, the information hunters became integrated into military operations. They were assigned to documents gathering teams that were called T-forces, T for target. And these T-forces followed directly behind the allied armies as they advanced scouring targets for operational or strategic information. They wore army uniforms and they operated under military command, serving as specialists to assess and select archival records and publications often on the fly, like instantaneous decisions. Although an unlikely role for bibliophiles and scholars, many of them took to this work. One of them was Private Max Loeb. I do not have a photograph of him, unfortunately. He was a German-born journalist. He emigrated to the United States and became a bookseller in New York City before joining the army and being assigned to the OSS. He had the idea of interrogating German prisoners of war in Great Britain who had worked in libraries and the book trade. His aim was to discover the whereabouts of important collections. And he turned up incredible information that was ultimately a value to military intelligence as well as more generally to people concerned about the fate of books. Another agent, Ross Lee Finney, was an avant-garde composer and music professor at Smith College, whom you see here on the right. He volunteered to do OSS acquisitions work. He arrived after the liberation of Paris, went from target to target, identified on a long list some of which he had created in Cambridge. As he wrote his wife, my work involves slightly different methods of acquiring foreign publications than I or anyone in Northampton, Massachusetts would use. He learned how to interrogate informants and follow suspicious people. He said I find I'm pretty good at sniffing down an aisle and tracing things. And he found massive quantities of printed materials which he confiscated. I requisitioned a two-and-a-half ton truck today, he wrote. I needed a convoy of them actually. On Thanksgiving Day 1944, he made his biggest discovery, a huge cache of patent abstracts which were sent back to the U.S. The T-forces looked especially from material with immediate intelligence value, research related to weaponry, aeronautics and other war-related fields and records that might be useful in the prosecution of war crimes. But there was a degree of mission creep, as there often is. And in the final stages of war, they seized all manner of work that might later be exploited for some purpose. As Max Loeb said, as he was engaged in this work, there were so many tempting targets that even after a good and successful day, he felt uneasy because there is still so much undone. He had seized 1,000 books that day and 12 runs of periodicals, and runs of 12 periodicals. Although they were ordered to respect the integrity of academic and public libraries, they considered collections that were in the service of Nazism to be fair game. For example, there was an institute for race studies housed in a university library that they removed but not the library's other collections. They took endangered books as well. As one officer in Cologne explained, we have felt no qualms about going into rubble which used to be bookstores and removing any items of value because they would have been destroyed. But there is also the sense of having a certain freedom to act prior to the establishment of order in these newly taken communities before the civil affairs officers came in. That they called the period of the snatch when the lid is literally off and almost anything goes. But it was another story when military government was in place. One officer went into a bookstore in Bonn and the Germans there were sort of looking at him and he felt too uncomfortable just seizing the stuff and stalking off as he put it, so he paid cash for the lot. As the investigators dug more deeply, they found vast quantities of books and publications stashed in surprising places. In the wake of bombing raids, German authorities had relocated and hidden state archives and library collections in caves, mines and castles for safety along with looted art and books on other treasures. Assault mine in Ronsbach where gold artworks and the costumes of the Berlin state opera had been stored also yielded a part, only part of the Prussian state library piled up in tunnels and disarray where two million volumes of books and journals, historical maps and other materials and there was no card catalog there. Tragically, a fire had burned for several months in the mine, likely set by refugees trying to keep warm and as one investigator reported, the books were in the process of gradual destruction from fume, smoke and dampness. This was only one of 25 places where the library had been stored and as the monuments men began surveying all of these areas, they found hundreds and hundreds of locations which contained not only works of art, but also libraries and archives. This wartime history laid the groundwork for the treatment of books during the period of Allied occupation. Mass collecting missions might have simply ceased or narrowed in scope when the war ended in May 1945, yet the opposite occurred. A convergence of needs and interests from the American library world, the civilian government and the military led to the expansion of librarians of involvement abroad. First, the war experience and Allied victory spurred research libraries to assume a more prominent global role which they believed required deeper and more extensive international holdings. During the war, the leaders of the major New York Public Library of Congress, top university libraries had committed themselves to a vision of American dominance through a cooperative program which they called the Farmington Plan which would involve bringing every, Archibald McLeish actually said he wanted somewhere in the country every book in the world. So through cooperation, the United States would amass an entire global collection. His successor at the Library of Congress, Luther Evans, argued that these holdings were a matter of national security. At the same time, American libraries competed fiercely with each other. This was not a genteel world that you might imagine when you think about libraries, not at all. Now that the war was over, librarians schemed to get back into Europe. And the one that was especially successful was the Hoover Institution, the Library of the Hoover Institution which had been founded by Herbert Hoover after World War I which sent a network of agents abroad to collect the fugitive records of war. And here are two journalists that were doing journalism certainly but also engaged in collecting records for Hoover. The military increasingly grew concerned about librarians running around former battlefields and devastated cities, scooping up books. So out of this situation, the Library of Congress proposed in the summer of 1945 to establish a mission to acquire books for themselves and American research libraries. This mission was initially seen as a book purchasing operation. It would fill the wartime gaps by buying three copies of every publication issued in Germany or occupied country since 1939. This arrangement made with the war and the state departments drew upon the expertise and the model of the OSS acquisition of publications. Ruben Pice was detached from the OSS to head the Library of Congress mission in the early fall of 1945. A group of American librarians joined him in January 1946. And here is a picture of the librarians in trench coats in front of the headquarters of the military government. Ruben Pice is the man in the middle with the pipe. And the elderly gentleman on the right is Harry Leidenberg who was the former head of the New York Public Library. One of the leading lights in the library field in the 20th century and at the time he was 70 years old when he made this trip. One goal of the mission was to go to Leipzig, the prewar center of the German book trade, to pick up a quarter of a million dollars worth of books that had been ordered by American libraries before the war. These had been successfully held in safekeeping despite considerable bombing damage to Leipzig. But now the Americans faced a different problem to get them. Leipzig had become part of the Soviet zone of occupation. So a very long and delicate negotiation took place between the American librarians and their Soviet counterparts for their release. And it was successful despite the increased tensions between the two countries in 1946, the beginnings of the Cold War. In what became something of a legend, Ruben Pice and a colleague, Jacob Suckerman, who was later the head of UNESCO's library division, led a convoy of trucks from Berlin to Leipzig, were waved through Soviet checkpoints. The only incident was that they were hailed by a so-called autobahn girl by the side of the road trying to get them to stop. They arrived in the city where they were treated like celebrities. The people hoped that their presence was a sign of an imminent U.S. takeover, which of course it was not. They dined and conversed with their Russian counterparts, increasingly friends while the trucks were loaded and returned the next day to Berlin with the goods. However, what was initially defined fairly narrowly evolved into something else. The Library of Congress representatives operated under the auspices of the U.S. occupation government in Germany, known as Amgus, which authorized them to go into research institutes and libraries where they examined and at times confiscated materials. They screened and evaluated the vast quantities of publications that had already been seized by T-forces and intelligence units. These are millions of pieces of material that needed to be screened. Those that were not needed by the military or intelligence were given to the Library of Congress mission. The librarians were also drawn to documents and ephemera, even though this was not really their charge. This, for example, was the kind of detritus of the Reese Collection, which involved posters, pamphlets and other materials documenting the Nazi era, which ultimately was sent to the Library of Congress. So you can see this became a massive-scale program of acquisitions. A crucial dimension of Allied occupation policy, which was the denazification of Germany, also involved books and librarians. Books with Nazi and militaristic content were seized. German bookstores and libraries were closed. Objectionable works were put under lock and key. It was true for schools, bookstores, publishing houses, and many libraries. And there were these raids called Operation Tally Ho to remove Nazi content from these places. This actually turned out to be a vast undertaking because the book trade was very large in Germany. Everything from academic treatises to school textbooks and popular fiction. Over time, stricter policies were enacted, culminating in an Allied agreement known as Order Number Four, to not only seize but destroy all literature and material of a Nazi nature. This included works that promoted fascism, militarism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism, and civil disorder. When word of this directive hit the American press, many Americans were outraged. During the war, as you can see from this poster, there were government statements condemning Nazi book burnings. Books cannot be killed by fire. Books are weapons in the war of ideas. So Order Number Four seemed like a betrayal of democratic values and the reason why Americans fought the war. And to counter this negative publicity, the Library of Congress mission proposed screening and preserving up to 150 copies of each objectionable work for future research and as a record of Nazism. With the rest sent to paper mills for pulping and producing much needed paper stock. And the military government officials were very upset at headlines like this one. Orders Nazi books burned. They said, no, we're pulping them. We're not burning them. The execution of this policy was uneven. We do not know exactly how many books were destroyed, but about 2 million of them made their way to American university libraries as well as the Library of Congress. These are just a sample of such books in my own library at the University of Pennsylvania. These were popular fiction books for the German troops. Field post books, they were called. And the librarians at Penn referred to them as junk, as did most librarians. But they saved them. Among the wartime missions involving books, the one that remains most meaningful to us today concerns the restitution of books that had been looted from Jewish individuals and institutions. Millions of these had been seized by Nazi looting teams, including those directed by Alfred Rosenberg to create an institute for research into the Jewish question. Essentially preserving these works for study even as the regime killed millions of Jews in the Holocaust. In April 1945, American troops discovered approximately 2 million of these looted volumes in a small village called Hungen. Two months later, a Jewish American officer looked up Rosenberg's institute in an old Frankfurt telephone directory and he went with a colleague to the site. The building itself had been destroyed, but they found scraps of paper with Hebrew writing on the ground, which led them into a cellar filled with these books. And the photograph on the left is a photo of one of those cellars. So how to gather, preserve, and restitute these books was an unanticipated problem assigned to the monument's men. Some of the books were easily identified and can be returned to their libraries of origin. The issue of restitution in this time period was that restitution was to the country, to the nation, not to the individual. However, many of these volumes were unidentifiable. Their owners were dead. Their whereabouts were unknown. Initially they were stored in this library, the Rothschild Library collecting point, which was a relatively small place. About 2 million were kind of crushed into this space. And the monument's men were so overwhelmed with the amount of work they had to do at this point that they gave the task of handling them to an American civilian whose name is Glenn Goodman, whose story I was fortunate to learn in an unpublished memoir. Goodman had been a student and teacher in Germany. He married there and did not leave when the U.S. went to war. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp and then at the end of the war when he was released he began to look for work and to find a way to return home with his wife and family. He found his way to an office of the monument's man Julius Buckman in Frankfurt. And there Buckman handed him three old volumes. And he said, can you identify these? And Goodman knew two of them and he bluffed on the third. And that was good enough for Buckman who told him to report to the Rothschild Library and begin to organize these books for restitution. It was a really almost impossible job. Finally, after many months of uncertainty, two military officers, both Jewish American, were put in charge. The first Seymour Pomerans, who was a professional archivist and who worked at the National Archives before the war and continued in government service long after. And Isaac Benkowitz who was a chemist and a veteran of both World Wars. They took over a large warehouse where the books had been relocated called the Offenbach archival depot. These administrators found ways to shelter, repair and identify these looted books. Essentially they developed a large-scale book processing plant with designing workflows to make it possible to identify and restitute rapidly. Despite the fact that the books were often damaged and in many different languages, most of which the German workers there could not read. Benkowitz came up with the idea of photographing the book plates and stamps in the books and having the workers memorize a small number of them. And when they saw a book with that stamp, they put it into a box with the number. As you can see, they're numbered on the side. This speeded up the identification process tremendously. And over two years they had returned over 3 million books. Even so, there were 360,000 that were still orphaned and needed to be dealt with. Ultimately these books were given to the control of a U.S.-based international organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. The group consisted of many Jewish scholars, lawyers and religious leaders. Its executive secretary was Hannah Arendt. And it distributed the books to Israel, the United States and smaller numbers to South Africa, South America and a very small number to Western Europe. So much of what I've described today involves improvised decisions made quickly on the ground in situations of destruction, danger and uncertainty and in which many other considerations with good reason had priority protecting troops feeding a defeated population and refugees. There were certainly ethical questions that were raised by the librarians involved and that came to be asked in the wake of this activity. And I can talk more about that if you have questions about, you know, how to think through the ethics of acquisition in this and restitution in this time period. But by way of conclusion I want to point to several important legacies of this effort. The war spurred new ways of thinking about fundamental aspects of professional library work such as reproduction using microphone, access and retrieval of printed materials. This wartime program strongly shaped information science after the war and that could only be realized through computerization but many of the ideas and practices began in this time period. A number of key figures in information science were closely involved in this OSS program. They include Eugene Power who founded University Microfilms which is now the information giant ProQuest and Frederick Kilgore who founded OCLC, the forerunner of WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database. The wartime acquisitions effort also contributed to the global stature and ambitions of American research libraries and it gave universities extensive international holdings for the first time. And as I said these were often seen as in serving the national interest and necessary for the pursuit of American foreign policy and global influence. At the same time the war turned some librarians in other directions including a renewed sense of internationalism many working for UNESCO for example and it led others to reflect upon the larger political purposes of their work, issues raised starkly by order number four and strengthened their commitment to civil liberties and the library bill of rights. Finally the restitution of looted books was a milestone in the evolution of international efforts to protect cultural heritage and to claim it as an aspect of human rights. So at the outset of the war no one could have foreseen a large-scale government led operation to acquire, exploit, rescue and restitute books. It turned out that the librarians and scholars skills expertise and aspirations aligned closely with American military and political objectives. They felt acutely their duty to win the war, their revulsion at the Nazi regime, their commitment to documenting the past and present for the future and they believed that only America could rescue endangered civilization. And as librarians and bibliophiles they were stirred by the books and documents they found. So their mission was bound up with the entire complex of American wartime values and post war aims mixing instrumental, strategic and political concerns to be sure but also a sense of responsibility to preserve the material records of knowledge and culture in the wake of so much destruction. Thank you. And we have some time for questions and answers. So if you have a question would you mind coming down to their microphones on either side since this is being filmed by C-Span. Thank you for your talk. It sounds as if the librarians were turned loose on Europe with the carte blanche whatever expertise they carried with them would allow them to know which books they might wish to take but I don't have the sense that there was a shopping list. Was there a shopping list? And secondarily what was the military role in trying to shape the actions of these men apart from the monious men, apart from restitution? Yes, great questions. So initially they believed, I mean they had the habits of librarians so what librarians do is they have what they call a want list and it's a list of books that they want and they go out and they go to a bookseller or dealer and secure them. And so the OSS was sending want lists to the agents in Stockholm, Lisbon, around the world and they were, you know, these were important materials that had been asked for. The problem of course was the time lag between getting, receiving that want list and how much time it would take to find the material and then microfilm it and ship it back. So this was not always the most effective way to proceed and in many cases they just, you know, whatever they found, they just microfilmed it and they did not particularly put it in any given order. So using it was, when it came to wartime agencies it was very difficult to use which was why the OSS then created indexes to these records. But they did have some sense of what they wanted but, you know, the events just outran their capacity to find them. With respect to the library collecting after the war, there was, in the sense of carte blanche they were told if the book was published in Germany or in an occupied country after 1939, acquire it. And that date got pushed back a bit to 1933 to include the Nazi regime and in some cases back even further to include the rise of Nazis and so when I say there's a mission creep here that is what is happening to some extent. The military, there were not everybody in the military was on board with this. They did not want librarians hanging around, you know, even the librarians in trench coats who were pretty well behaved. But they, you know, some people thought this is just not for you. This is really something the military should be doing. But because there was an effort to return troops home, you know, to speed up the return of troops back home, they really had staffing problems and the enormity of the material that had been collected was such that they welcomed the Library of Congress mission in particular that more or less not all of them followed the rules but most of them did. I have two questions. First is just was there any coordination at all with the people preparing for the trials? And then the second question is I was fascinated by the part of your talk about the new techniques of library science that developed as part of this. And I wonder if preservation was part of this at all or if this was just a turn towards, you know, microfilming and forgetting about the original. You know, it's shocking to see these materials sitting in salt mines off and back also, you know, this stuff must have been in terrible shape. Were there any preservation techniques used? Yes. So then remind me your first question. I had two from there. Oh, just coordination with the trials. With the trials. So the T-forces into the fall of 1945, which included people like Max Loeb, were asked to look for material that could be used for the tribunals. And they did find a number of materials that were then used. It wasn't a primary, it wasn't like somebody dedicated to that purpose, but they were asked to be on the lookout essentially for material that could be used. So yes, absolutely. And films too. I mean, not simply textual materials but films as well. The library techniques, I mean, I think preservation. So microfilming was seen as a method of preservation as well as reproduction. And I think that probably there are a number of newspapers and periodicals that only exist on microfilm that is inaccessible and probably unreadable at this moment in time because it hasn't been preserved. But they had the sense that we need to do every thing we can to preserve this history. And yes, it was very important to them to find ways to do that. With the Rothschild Library, for example, Glenn Goodman sent many of the books that had worms in them or, you know, other kinds of animal infestations. He sent them to the Frankfurt City Hospital for defumigation and to kill off, you know, anything that was living in the books. And they found ways to dry the books. And so they were very attentive to conservation issues. Kind of primitive because they didn't have a lot of materials, but they were very attentive to it. The overall importance of this program and mission are really fascinating and clear. But frankly, individuals are always titillated by specific, juicy anecdotes. Were you able to tie any particular acquisitions during the war to a, you know, a strategic battlefield moment or something like that? Unfortunately, no. Frederick Kilgore always claimed that among the materials that were found by the his group, the IDC, that there was material related to the atomic bomb that was useful to American physicists. I don't know that I can confirm that. I mean, that was his claim. And he made it not only to me personally at age 90, but also in his budget reports that there were, you know, rocketry and other kinds of weaponry. That information was useful. But I can't really tie it. I mean, I think there's a kind of gap between what they were hoping this material would show and its actual usability in the midst of battle. Thank you. Dr. First off, I want to thank you for your talk. I'm sorry I came late, but I know that your book deals a lot with librarians and library science for the archival piece. That's when I'm concentrating in my masters in right now. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about your research and if there's any focus on particularly the archival side of the Monuments Finance and Archives section, Roberts Commission, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. So because this became a really large project that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life on, I had to, I mean, I entered into some archival material when it followed logically from the book collecting missions. And when I looked at the Hoover Library in particular, which was a really interesting story, Hoover was interested in archives, records, diaries, memoirs, and other materials of that sort. And so I write at length about their efforts, which were much more focused on unique items that were archival. There's a wonderful book by a German historian, Astrid Eckert, called The Struggle for the Files, which deals with this very specifically with archives and the bringing brought to the United States and then the effort to return them to Germany after the war. Two questions. The smaller question is this. Books are not like works of art or jewels. What was the motivation of the Nazis in looting libraries in the countries that they occupied? And the more important question is this. It seems to me extraordinary for the American government to spend government money on books when the attitude was the war is over return to normality. Who were the people who had such intellectual insight that they could convince the American government to pay attention to the intellectual treasures of civilization? Great questions. The first one about looting, Nazi looting books and why. In some cases there were rare book collections that they seized because they were rare treasures. But in many cases they were seizing the libraries of Jewish institutions, ordinary individuals. And the hard thing to kind of wrap our minds around is that they wanted to create a the scientific study of the Jewish, what they would call the Jewish race. And they needed all of these books to put into institutes for advanced study essentially where scholars could later go and study what they term the Jewish question after the population of Jews had been killed. So it's as one of the people who write about this at the time says it's just this strange irony. But that was their motive that they had an intellectual interest in understanding Jews, obviously to justify genocide, but that this became part of a science. And that's what Alfred Rosenberg, for example, was interested in. The second question. I'm going to see if everybody gives me two questions and I remind. The people in the government. Yes. So I think it's important to realize that at the end of the war the United States sees itself as winning the war and that this has been a massive effort on the part of government, military, ordinary citizens, the intellectual and academic world. And I think that there isn't this sense initially of we're not going to, okay, that's a moment and now it's gone. Rather the war opens up a vista of postwar intellectual and political dominance by the United States. It's a great investment by government agencies in scientific research. There is investment in libraries and the librarians are making that case at least at the end of the war. And it's a successful argument. One that may again at this current moment may seem unusual to put it mildly. One more? Anyone else? Yes. I was curious during the war itself your uncle and his colleagues in Stockholm and Portugal weren't they, wasn't it suspicious that somebody with an American accent was looking for lots of books in German? You'd think. They did not have code names or secret names or anything. They went on their own names on their own passports and they were often identified as working for the Library of Congress. And of course the reputation of the Library of Congress was very prominent and people said, oh yes, of course you'd want to be here seeking out books. So for the most part they did not have problems. In Portugal they didn't have problems but there was a lot of caution about going into Spain where Franco's regime was far more attentive to what this might mean. But yes, I think that it kind of conjures up the Casablanca image of all the spies in the same location. And there's just a lot of people looking for information in these cities and these librarians were among them. Being a librarian is a good cover is what I've been told. Well thank you all very much. I appreciate it.