Information Hunters When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe By Kathy Peiss

Information Hunters When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe

By Kathy Peiss

Dr. Kathy Peiss was born on January 25, 1953, in Greenfield MA. The granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in the United States in the early 20th century (So here is the deal. The basic plot of An American Tale - you know the kids movie with Jewish mice - is basically true. The Black Hundreds and other groups brutally pogromed Jews across Russia, leading to the latest in several waves of Jewish immigration to the United States. Waves, which increased the Jewish population of the country to the point that Americans threw a xenophobic hissy-fit drivan by capitalists and Antisemitism became endemic. America’s immigration problems are not new. The target is the only thing that ever changes. I’ll just be over here listening to Yiddish language Klezmer music.). She attended Carleton College, graduating in 1975 with her bachelor's degree (Presumably in History). She earned her Masters and Ph.D. at Brown University graduating from there in 1982. She then began to teach at Rutgers, Cornell, and the University of Maryland, where she developed a women's studies program (Feminism is important, yo!). From there she headed to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she served as director of the history graduate program, she also wrote her first book there; Cheap Amusements, which focused on the social life of working-class women in New York at the turn of the century. She also co-edited Passion and Power, an anthology about sexuality in American history. With the publishing of the Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, a book discussing the history of makeup in the US, Dr. Peiss began to get media attention and was invited to appear in a number of documentaries. The book itself was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was named one of Amazon's 1999 top ten books in Women's Studies. Dr. Peiss later moved to the University of Pennsylvania becoming the Roy F. and Jeannett P Nichols Professor of American History and kept writing. Her latest book (and I'm skipping a number of works to give us room to actually review this book) Information Hunters When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe was inspired when she found out through the magic of the internet, that she had an uncle she never met. Ruben Peiss, who according to her family was a spy. Let's be honest, no one, let alone an acclaimed historian could just leave that story alone (I know I couldn’t.). So Dr. Peiss started digging, what she found was a massive piece of history that was practically forgotten. Let's take a look, shall we?

Post World War One, the libraries, and librarians of the United States began to embrace new techniques and technologies. New ways of cataloging and archiving books, periodicals, and other works made it vastly easier to know just who had what and where. Technologies like microfilm were all the rage as it was seen as solving the space issue every library faces (Praise be unto microfilm.). The libraries of the United States also began to work together and exchange catalogs and indexes and set up shared borrowing programs to make research and development easier. To be clear, I'm not just talking about public libraries, although they were an important part of this but also university and professional libraries, research libraries, and government archives. There was also an embrace of a whole new ideology that sprang from the fear that world war one could have destroyed culture and art in Europe. To put this in context, at the time Europe was very much the technological, economic, and financial capital of the world, undergirded by the vast colonial empires that the Great Powers carved from the rest of the world and the exploitation of people's they weren't able or willing to colonize (Sound familiar?). Because of this European Culture and Art were prioritized over everyone else, imparting a very Eurocentric view of history. Also... To be honest, Europe's libraries and museums were full of books and cultural artifacts looted from other cultures creating issues we're still hashing out but that's another book review (TL;DR: Basically Europe looted everyone else, and to this day resists giving what they stole back based on some pretty White Man’s Burden bullshit about how their custody is necessary to preserve archeological and artistic treasures from the barbarians. Never mind the fact that the real barbarians were the fucking Belgians even by European standards. Don’t worry, America isn’t left out here.). After the carnage and destruction of World War One, the libraries of America began to embrace the idea of serving as an outpost and final redoubt of European culture and heritage (And everyone else’s). A safe-house for books, art, and artifacts away from the dangers of war and other such madness. This was considered fairly reasonable because North America was fairly peaceful compared to other continents and well out of the range of even the greatest weapons of the time. The fact that this also expanded American prestige and importance was of course a mere by-product of a noble mission to save civilization (wink, wink). This probably would have faded over time except... Nazis (Who we still aren’t finished killing.). On April 8th, 1933 the main office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit” which climaxed in a literary purge by fire (I’ve mentioned this before, but it is worth repeating because it is pride month. What you don’t know because your history books don’t tell you, is that the iconic Nazi Book Burning you always see photos of? Yeah, that was the burning of the archives of Institut Für Sexualwißenschaft, one of the first human sexuality research institutes and the global progenitor of the queer rights movement. They burned it. America straight-washed it, and kept queer people in prison after liberating the survivors of the concentration camps.). The reaction in the American literary sphere was one of panic and horror. If these barbarians would burn their own books, what would happen if they got a hold of other people's books after all?

This was the seed for a mission shared between the Library of Congress of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (The progenitor of the CIA. A pox be upon them for their perfidy.). This was further nurtured and tended by the personal cooperation of the legendary head of the OSS Wild Bill Donovan and the Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish (That is one hell of a name.). Wild Bill was concerned about gathering intelligence against enemy nations and when they began meeting in the spring and summer of 1941, he knew that his nation would soon be at war. Archibald, himself a patriot, was willing to help, and being a librarian his mind naturally turned to books. Even before the war, there was a concern over the practices of the Nazis. Not only did they burn books but they seized them. From the Jewish peoples of conquered nations but also from the universities, libraries, and printers of those same nations (And they often destroyed those works which conflicted with their ideology. Judenphysik, for example. Or physics they considered too Jewish.{And were left utterly incapable of building a working nuclear weapon. Most of their accomplishments would be mainly engineering in nature… Hm}). Both men knew that the United States could be cut off from important technical information and research. Archibald was also convinced that important intelligence could be gleaned from periodicals printed by the Nazis, periodicals that were often strictly controlled. This led to phase one of the deployment, teams were sent to the neutral cities of Europe, Lisbon, and Stockholm in the main to collect books and periodicals that the Nazi government were trying to keep secret, take pictures that could be converted to microfilm and send them back to London and Washington DC. Stockholm was headed by the only lady field agent of this operation, Adele Kibre. She was a medievalist who had taught Latin at Berkeley, spoke seven languages and had spent the 1930s living in Italy and traveling throughout Europe. She also considered microphotography a great advancement and spent a lot of her own time in the study of the art. Born in Hollywood with brothers and sisters in the film business she could also use family connections to gain access to rare works and did so shamelessly. She was actually in France when the Germans invaded and fled with cases full of microfilm copies of rare works that she had gained access to. Under her leadership, Stockholm would be the most successful field station in the first phase. This aggravated her superiors, mainly because she steadfastly refused to explain how she was so successful (Obviously, then men might take the credit! Seriously, that was and still is a problem.{I get that but that meant the wider war effort suffered because no one could replicate her success. Lisbon was a smabbles compared to her} True. But there is also a security issue too. If you transmit your means and methods, they could be intercepted and countermeasures taken.). Flat out ignoring requests to report or write down her collection methods and other such details. As such we're not entirely sure how she was successful either.

The Second Phase was taken over by a force of Librarians, book collectors, and military officers in mixed units dubbed T forces. Their job was to race right behind the leading edge of the Allied Advance into Europe and try to find and secure the caches of rare books looted by the Nazis and secure them against damage or unauthorized looting. This phase of the war often rode the edge of acceptable behavior especially as the Allies fought their way into Germany itself. The question of what the fine line between preservation and looting was one that would keep coming up again and again and honestly was never really answered (I mean…). On the one hand without the efforts of the T forces, entire universities and libraries of written works would have lost forever or at best disappeared into the Black Market and been hidden away in private collections for who knows how long (Private collectors are the bane of existence as far as archeology, paleontology, and historical preservation are concerned. {When he talks about private collectors he doesn’t mean people who keep their own libraries mind you but people who use their wealth to hoard rare books and prevent their coping or relics that belong to a museum like…} Hobby Lobby for instance recently had to give a tablet containing fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh to federal authorities, because they didn’t do their due diligence and procured it from a smuggler.). On the gripping hand, the T Forces also served as the instrument of finding and preserving the vast amount of Jewish books and relics that the Nazis looted. Strangely enough, instead of destroying these works, the SS gathered the books and artifacts together with an ambition to create a museum to the “Jewish Question” and their all-too-human and all-too-monstrous solution to that “question.” It's an odd feeling to be grateful to the packrat tendencies of the SS, but here I am. The question of who got final custody of the looted Jewish property was an intense one, as the decimated Jewish communities of Europe were considered by many to be pretty much on their last legs. Different Jewish groups in England, the United States, and what was soon to be Israel would duel for possession, while private persons and institutions would fight lonely battles to retrieve their property, often not entirely sure that their property had survived in the first place (This is one of the reasons why Israel exists, in point of fact. When they got let out of the concentration camps, their expropriated homes had new residents, they hadn’t been allowed to keep their family documents and deeds. And to an extent, no one wanted them back. The US took in some, as for the rest, they got shipped off to Palestine.). This would continue well into the 1950s and was in the background as the operation shifted into the 3rd phase. What to do with all the Nazi written books and propaganda pieces that the Army was now in rather unwilling possession of. Especially given the Army's commitment to deNazification before the Cold War kinda shifted priorities around. When the French and Russians started pushing the idea of simply destroying all the Nazi works... The US Army was inclined towards the idea which caused the Libraries and literary community of the United States to go up in flames. Many men and women announcing that they hadn't made sacrifices of blood, treasure, and years of their lives battling a bunch of book burning murderous barbarians only to turn around and start copying their behavior. Frankly, I can see where they were coming from here especially given the strain of American thought that likes to ban books, almost always for the sake of the children (Or rather The Children™.). The Army was a bit put out by this as they weren't burning anything, they were mulching the books and using the mulch to create new paper for German printing industries. As always the ability of the brass to miss the damn point is awe-inspiring. A compromise was reached where every written work would have an example saved but there was no need to save every copy of every Nazi comic book after all. The last phase was determining what to do with the works that couldn't be handed over to someone else and most of them went to the Library of Congress. Which kinda made it the final safe-house after all in a way didn't it?

Dr. Peiss takes us through each phase of the combined operations of the Library of Congress and the OSS with great attention to detail and willingness to examine the context in which the agents operated. She is also willing to spend a good amount of space on those agents, many of whom were immigrants fleeing the oppression of the dictatorships of Europe. A great many of the operations of the US Army and the OSS were only possible because of immigrant volunteers willing to go back into danger for their adopted country (And yet here we are, treating immigrants like shit to this day.). This operation was no different. She also isn't afraid to ask hard questions that are still difficult to answer today. Like how much of this was justified and how much of this was the victorious US and Western Allies looting books and rare works because they could. It's a hard question to answer because there was some looting going on, at the same time the US and its allies, even the Soviet Union (which looted like it was the only shopper in a going out of business sale when it came to Eastern Europe and Germany [In fairness, the Germans did completely wreck half their country, and they were anticipating war with the US. They dismantled factories and shit.] {Sure but they also looted Poland and other conquered territories complete with kidnapping people from those conquered populaces. We talked a bit about that in Trail of Hope you might recall} Yes. Absolutely no denial there. The USSR was ruled by dicks.) exercised more restraint and concern then the Nazis did on their best day. This is a book that shines a light into an obscure and sometimes strange corner of one of the greatest events in history and leaves you with a lot to think about. Because of that, I'm giving Information Hunters When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe By Kathy Peiss an A. Pick it up if any of the above sounds interesting.

I'm not going to talk about our patron this week, given the events that have rocked the nation, it would feel cheap and tawdry to do so to me. I'm not going to talk those to death either, as I'm sure everyone reading this has heard plenty already and I doubt I can add anything of value. Instead, your editor and I are leaving some links below this review for places you can donate to or volunteer at to help protesters victimized by this or aid in clean up and recovery. If our support for the protesters offends you? Too damn bad, don't bother telling me you're leaving angry, just fucking leave (Seeing as I am one of the protesters, I’ll second that. Black Lives Matter. If you can watch George Floyd’s lynching and not be concerned with the now-open fascism of the police, fuck you, bootlicker. Leave.). To the rest of you? Let us do the best we can and remember that even if times are dark and trying now, there will be a better day. Until then, do your best, stay safe and as always keep reading.

If you would like to support our people in the fight against police brutality:

https://bailfunds.github.io/ has a comprehensive list of bailout funds with links. Anything left over tends to go toward funding protest actions or community relief programs. Also, if you would like to go out and protest yourself the following link has useful advice on how to go out and do that.
https://mashable.com/article/how-to-find-george-floyd-protests-near-me/

If you are in the Jacksonville FL area, the Jacksonville Community Action Committee is the org you want to find. If all else fails (and this is a shameless plug that Frigid is not responsible for) find your local DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter. We’re plugged in everywhere.

https://www.dsausa.org/chapters/

https://www.gofundme.com/f/scores-bar-mpls-riot-rebuild Donate to help rebuild a looted business

https://www.gofundme.com/f/cleanup-during-protest/donate/sign-in To help funding and supplying clean up efforts

https://www.sfcommunitysupport.org/ Mutual aid association

https://www.gofundme.com/f/blmcovid Mutual aid association and fund for the D.C. area

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-justiceforgeorgefloyd-protesters-in-atlanta Legal aide for protesters in Atlanta

https://www.gofundme.com/f/covid19-mutual-aid-network Mutual Aide for Los Angles, also includes relief for COVID 19

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/public-goods/ Minneapolis Mutual Aide association

https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd George Flyod fund for the care of his family.

https://unicornriot.ninja/ an alternative media organization devoted to providing on site coverage

https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision Police reform group

https://www.lgbtqfund.org/ Bail and legal funds for LGBTQ persons

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd?refcode=cwg Act Blue allows you to donate to many organizations at once.

https://mutualaidphilly.com/ Mutual Aid association Philadelphia

https://www.restoringjustice.org/bail Community Bail fund, providing bail for poor persons on a national level.

https://faithintx.org/bailfund/ Community Bail fund, providing bail for poor persons on a national level.

https://www.covid19mutualaidslc.com/ Donate or volunteer for mutual aide in Salt Lake City

https://www.gofundme.com/f/i-run-with-maud A fund for the care of Ahmaud Arbery Mother

https://www.gofundme.com/f/9v4q2-justice-for-breonna-taylor A fund for Breanna Taylor’s family and their legal battle.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/justicefordavidmcatee A fund for the funeral of David McAtee business owner in Kentucky murdered by police action.

https://www.naacpldf.org/about-us/ Naacp Legal Defense and education fund

https://www.givemn.org/story/Mxmjeg Aide society focusing on those rended homeless.

https://www.changethenypd.org/issue organization for the reform of the NYPD. God be with them.

https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/ Activist group for racial justice, donate or volunteer.

https://www.cuapb.org/what_we_do Communities United Against Police Brutality, providing political action, services to victims and other aid.

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 Black Lives Matter Global Network

https://action.aclu.org/give/now American Civil Liberties Union

https://cpj.org/donate?fbclid=IwAR2ZWwXctd_2B7Y-kxqzTVX1HqHyxIiupeplYuvoo-sdqWw8UJa72AZHuZA "The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. CPJ protects the free flow of news and commentary by taking action wherever journalists are under threat."

https://www.nlg-npap.org/donate/ "National Police Accountability Project (NPAP) is a project of the National Lawyers Guild, which was founded in 1937 as the first racially integrated national bar association. In 1999, NPAP was created as a non-profit to protect the human and civil rights of individuals in their encounters with law enforcement and detention facility personnel. The central mission of NPAP is to promote the accountability of law enforcement officers and their employers for violations of the Constitution and the laws of the United States."

Red text is your editor Dr. Allen
Normal text is your reviewer Garvin

Join us next week for Blood, Oil and the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941 by John Broich. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!