With all of the numerous literature on the Shoah, it is surprisingly difficult to find (English) works focussing on the Fascist assault on Jewish cultures; most barely touch on the subject. Many sources (such as this one) are content to simply remind us of the Shoah’s death toll as if that automatically does all of the explaining for them, but the Western Axis’s incomplete annihilation of Yiddishists only tells us half of the story.
As I’ll soon show you, the Fascist approach to Jewish cultures was actually less straightforward than you might expect, but there was certainly an element of annihilation involved:
In Poland, in both Bedzin and Poznan, special German “Brenn-Kommandos” (arson squads) were assigned to burn the Jewish synagogues and books.¹¹ The destruction of Torah scrolls and other religious books was especially difficult for the religious Jewish community, since according to orthodox religious law, it is imperative that these materials be treated with the utmost respect and reverence, and those who destroy such sacred documents are considered in violation of a divine command. It is stated: “The sefer torah, or any sacred book or writing, or anything which has served a holy purpose, which has become worn out, must not be burned but secreted.”¹²
Some Jews attempted to save Torah scrolls and other materials from the burning buildings but were either shot or thrown into the flames.¹³ In such a way the Great Talmudic Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin burned while [Fascists] cheered and Jews wept.¹⁴ [Fascist] correspondents stated:
For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy […] which was known as the greatest in Poland […] We threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market-place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.¹⁵
[…]
In the Vilna ghetto […] the books read there were in Polish (70.4 percent) and Yiddish (17.6 percent), with Russian, Hebrew, and other languages making up the rest. Within four months circulation increased to about 140,000 and the library was “full of readers.” However, by September of 1943 the ghetto was liquidated and along with it much of the material from the ghetto library, which was used by the janitor to heat the furnace of the house.⁵⁶
Nonetheless, the incendiary method, as far as I can tell, was exceptional rather than standard. The Axis had more ‘refined’ ways of dealing with Jewish literature:
Dr. Pohl arrived in Vilna in January 1942 together with four assistants (two of whom had academic training), Drs. Miller, Wulf, Sparkett, and Gimpel. He ordered that all the Jewish book collections should be gathered at the Yiddisher Visenshaftlikker Institut (YIVO) building at 18 Wiwulski Street.
Books soon began to arrive and included materials from more than 300 synagogues as well as private collections. In addition to books, Pohl also disposed of the plates of the Romm publishing house, noted for its editions of the Talmud.⁴⁰ The remains of the Kletzkin publishing house were also brought to YIVO but were sent mainly for pulping.⁴¹
The Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Vilna was ordered to provide twenty workers, five of them experts in Judaica, to select, catalog, and ship the books. One hundred thousand volumes were arranged by century of publication; 20,000 of these in seventy-four cases were then shipped to [the Third Reich] with the rest being sold to a paper mill for pulp at nineteen Reichsmark per ton.⁴² Pulping was a widespread practice and initially there were few guidelines to determine what should be saved.
Now this is when things become complicated. Long-term readers are surely familiar with how the Fascists destroyed synagogues (e.g. Rashi Shul), yet you might have never particularly noticed the inconsistency where they sometimes let others (e.g. Altneuschul) simply gather dust. A similar inconsistency towards Jewish literature existed:
However, in February 1943, Dr. Cruse of the ERR issued the following directive: “Books in Hebrew script of recent date (later than 1800, insofar as this can be determined) may be turned over for pulping; this applies to prayerbooks, Memorbuecher and other religious works in the German language. On the other hand, please send here all writings which bear on the history of culture and the nature of Judaism, as well as the works of Jewish authors.”⁴³
From my research, it looks like most Third Reich officials preferred to stop, but not exactly annihilate, Jewish cultures. What I mean by this is that in many cases they were content to merely seize Yiddish and other Jewish works as trophies, not always with an intent to destroy them, but without expecting a future for Yiddish either:
In December 1939 [Berlin] decreed that all book collections in Poland, other than those owned by German natives, were to be confiscated and so ordered them to be surrendered.¹⁷ In Warsaw the great library of the Synagogue and of the Institute of Jewish Studies, with its collections related to the Near East and rare manuscripts from the tenth century, was taken away to Berlin by a special unit led by Professor Paulsen. Other Jewish libraries from Warsaw were sent to Vienna.¹⁸ Jewish libraries from Łódź and other areas were relocated to St. Michael's Church in Poznan, which was unused because of the transfer of the entire Polish population.¹⁹
In 1941 the [Axis] founded a Reichsuniversität in Poznan with a professorship for Jewish history and languages and a library of about 400,000 volumes in Judaica confiscated from Jewish libraries. Jewish books were also transferred to other [Fascist] institutes in Poland, including the Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit in Cracow, founded in 1940 as a research division on East European Jewry and a branch of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage of Frankfurt in Łódź.²⁰
It is possible that books from Poland and other areas of the East were sent to other large libraries of the Reich but there is no definitive evidence of this. There is, however, a letter from the Prussian State Library in 1943 expressing an interest in approximately 30,000 materials that had been collected in Vilna. Other materials found their way informally to institutions and individuals.²¹
A few Jewish adults noticed the paradox of the Axis preserving certain Jewish works. Quoting Elisabeth Gallas's A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust, page 59:
The survival of a collection was rarely coincidental or arbitrary: The [Fascists] themselves had determined whether it was destroyed or confiscated. Joshua Starr, chief executive of the JCR in New York who worked at the Offenbach Depot from June 1948 to April 1949 on behalf of his organization, described this phenomenon: “Today when one handles a book stamped Sichergestellt durch Einsatzstab RR, he holds a mute witness of the final phase of a program designed to concentrate staggering facilities for the investigation of the Jewish past and present. […] It is, as we shall see, largely to this bizarre program that we owe credit in the grim sense, for the survival of portions of Jewish property in central Europe.”¹³⁴
Hannah Arendt later refers to the same paradox in her famous report Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she describes the German authorities' painstaking approach to the looting and amassing of Jewish cultural property: “Incidentally, an eagerness to establish museums commemorating their enemies was very characteristic of the Nazis. During the war, several services competed bitterly for the honor of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries. We owe to this strange craze the salvage of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry.”¹³⁵
Lastly, there is a certain Herzlian fascist whom I would like to cynically thank for inspiring me to research this subject. Quoting Dan Tamir’s Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922–1942, pages 146–147:
Having read that members of a Yiddish speaking socialist group had sent to their colleagues in Vilnius some of the stones which were thrown on them, together with their blood-stained shirts, Aḥime’ir joyfully promised them that
if they continue to spread here their Ashdodian language, then the empty museum of “Culture for the Wearies” in Vilnius will soon be filled with shirts and stones from our country. And if they continue importing Yiddish to our country, then they will also find themselves exporting more shirts, stones, shards of glass and broken skulls…¹⁷
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Further reading: Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books & Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish.