This came in from another mailing list Of possible interest in case there are any books like this that were confiscated during the occupation from Greek libraries and archives <<< If you would like to contact him directly about this, his email is jmcspadden(a)unr.edu. <snip>... he is more than happy to have the word spread to booksellers and librarians.>> So feel free to forward this to anyone who might have useful information. June Samaras =========================== ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Jon Munster &lt;jon.munster(a)munsterbooks.com&gt; Date: Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 3:22 PM Hello all, I was recently contacted by James McSpadden, who is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, about a book that we have listed for sale. This started a fascinating conversation regarding the huge amount of material that was obtained by the U.S. in Europe following WWII and brought back to be placed in American institutions. I'm sharing here the segment of the conversation in which Dr. McSpadden explains the project he has been working on. If you would like to contact him directly about this, his email is jmcspadden(a)unr.edu. I have let him know that I would be sharing this information with the ExLibris members, and he is more than happy to have the word spread to booksellers and librarians. He has sent me photos of examples of the stamps and penciled markings in books that were brought from Europe, which I cannot post here, of course, but I have included his comments on the markings in some of the books he has at the end of his explanation of his project. At any rate, I thought that many of you would be interested in what he is working on: "Just to elaborate more on my project, I’m interested in the post-WWII influx of European books brought to the US, particularly through the Library of Congress’ Mission to Europe. You might know this already, but after World War II, the Library of Congress sent a small team of American librarians to occupied Europe and brought back over two million individual books, pamphlets, films, audio recordings, and issues of magazines or newspapers for distribution to America’s research libraries. Universities received the bulk of this material; I know that Harvard—where I was a graduate student—got over 58,000 items, but these books were distributed to almost 200 universities and libraries across the country including Duke, Iowa State, Michigan, Columbia, Stanford, the Colorado School of Mines, the Hoover Institution, etc. This all happened from about 1946 to 1949. Since then, many libraries have deaccessioned books and the Library of Congress held duplicate sales in the 1950s that introduced many of these books to the used book market. Turning back to the books themselves, some of the books brought by the Library of Congress to the US can be troubling in terms of provenance—and more historically interesting to me—when you look at the ownership stamps in them. A number are from the SS, the German Wehrmacht, Hitler’s deputy’s library, etc.—and they have the stamps and bookplates to prove it. However, rather than all two million items being Nazi propaganda, lots of the books were first stolen by the Nazis from their enemies—socialists, Jews, competing right-wing parties, etc.—and then accessioned into Nazi institutional collections. These collections, which included the books stolen by the Nazis, were then carted off to the US by American soldiers and librarians. In trying to understand the scope of this collection project, I have tracked down some of these books at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, the Hoover Institution, as well as online with GoogleBooks. Many of the books with troubling provenances from Michigan and Berkeley have even been digitized by Google and are available online at Hathi Trust. For example, the University of Michigan has this book http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015026648751?urlappend=%3Bseq=9 which was the property of the Jewish B’nai B’rith Association in Prague before it ended up in the Nazi Archives and came to the US. These doubly confiscated books are the most interesting to me, and the only way to see where these books came from is to flip through the first few pages and examine the stamps in them. I’m interested in pairing the individual histories of these books with a larger history that I can glean from archives. For example, I’ve spent time in the Library of Congress’ archives, where I found the records for the initial seizure of a lot of these books—when librarians wrote to military officers asking to confiscate collections they stumbled across in occupied Germany and Austria, from example. I’ve also located evidence in German archives of socialist collections the Nazis intended to steal (with a list of all their books) and then I found individual books from those collections in American libraries. I found agreements between the State Department and West Germany to return collections—specially the socialist trade union collections—to Germany in the 1950s that were not completely returned because many of the books had already been distributed around the country. I also found evidence that libraries at Princeton, UPenn, and elsewhere objected to receiving confiscated books on principle, so their books were sent to Harvard and the New York Public Library instead. I also know that a lot of these postwar European books were directed through the Offenbach Archival Depot in Germany and then to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in the US. From there, many also went to university libraries or entered the used book market. For instance, I found a book of translated Yiddish poetry at Harvard that was in Alfred Rosenberg’s anti-Semitic research institute but previously had belonged to a “Moritz Israel Kulp,” who Yad Vashem lists as a victim of the Holocaust. The two photos of the Handbuch der Verfassung und Verwaltung, originally in Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess’ office’s library, show a plethora of German stamps on the title page and then on the reverse is “111” in pencil at the top left and a blue stamp that I know to be from the Library of Congress (sorry that photo is blurry). The blue “3” stamp—sometimes it’s also black or purple—indicates this book was transferred to the LoC from another federal authority, and the pencil mark is the catalogers’ subject classification. I found all this in the archives, but 111 corresponds to JE-JV in the LC classification system, or “Constitutional History.” The pencil LC numbers and stamp are actually the telltale signs that a book went through the LC process for distribution to other libraries. I’m attaching a photo of another book from Harvard with similar pencil marks and the Ex Libris of the Nazi treasurer, as well as a book originally in the KaDeWe lending library, which was owned by Jewish business partnership, this book was taken by the Nazis for their archive. I’m also attaching UC books with the penciled numbers I mentioned." =================- June Samaras KALAMOS BOOKS (For Books about Greece) 2020 Old Station Rd Streetsville,Ontario Canada L5M 2V1 Tel : 905-542-1877 E-mail : kalamosbooks(a)gmail.com www.kalamosbooks.com http://kalamosb.alibrisstore.com/ http://www.antiqbook.com/books/bookseller.phtml/kal