Book Thieves.. In Search of Lost Libraries

On the evening of May 10, 1933, flames engulfed all of Germany. In Berlin’s Opera Square, 40,000 people gathered to hear the fiery speech of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who declared that the fire marked the end of the decadent cultural life of the Weimar Republic. Books by Marx, Mann, Brecht, and Hemingway were consumed by the flames.

But behind the book burnings lies a lesser-known story: the Nazis’ looting of thousands of libraries and the theft of millions of books in occupied countries. Two fearsome men, SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, vied for control of Europe’s literary heritage. Himmler amassed a vast library on the “enemies of the Reich” at SS headquarters in Berlin. Rosenberg’s plan was even more ambitious, aiming to establish the foundations of an entirely new Nazi academic and research system. There, the future leadership of the Third Reich would be nurtured, and a series of new research institutes would be established to justify the invasions and genocide of Jews, Roma, and political enemies.

In his novel *The Book Thieves*, Anders Riedl tells the story of one of the Nazis’ most horrific projects. He traveled across Europe, retracing the steps of the thieves in search of lost libraries and the unknown fate of the stolen books. The novel has been translated into numerous languages ​​and published in the USA, China, Japan, Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere. It has won several awards, most recently the Hespelice Prize for Best Historical Novel in Spain in 2022.