The War Over There: American Librarians’ Responses to World War II

Alisha M. Linam

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Libraries have long been casualties of war. Infamously, the most extensive library

in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, was gradually destroyed by acts of war.

Knights of the Fourth Crusade targeted the Imperial Library of Constantinople. During the

War of 1812, British troops burned the Library of Congress along with the rest of

Washington. On August 25, 1914, German soldiers set fire to the Library of the Catholic

University of Louvain, shocking the modern world. More recently, the National Library of

Sarajevo was destroyed in the Bosnian War in a direct attack against cultural heritage. The

cultural heritage of the libraries of Iraq and Afghanistan have been at risk in those war torn

countries. Many other libraries have suffered the ravages of war as direct targets or indirect

victims. No war, however, has been more destructive for libraries and their contents than

the Second World War. Millions of books and dozens of libraries across Europe and

Britain were burned or irreparably damaged by war related incidences, including thousands

of irreplaceable manuscripts and early books. At the heart of these stories are the librarians

who are the caretakers of the books. Their stories have been underappreciated. What do

librarians do when faced with war?

Argument and Sources

This paper will examine American librarians’ responses to World War II through

the lens of two of their professional journals. Other scholarship has explored the actual

destruction of libraries, and librarians have looked at the actions their predecessors took

during wartime, but no one has looked at what the professional literature the average

librarian in Kentucky or Montana said or thought about the war. While it is important to

know what the president of the American Library Association (ALA) was doing during the

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war and what steps were being taken to protect the great collections of Harvard and Yale’s

libraries, modern war histories stress the importance of the home front, which includes

those librarians in Kentucky and Montana. By looking at two of the most important and

widely read professional library journals at the time, one can explore several questions.

What did the average librarian know about the war in Europe? Did the professional

journals cover important events leading up to the United States going to war, and what do

any silences mean? What roles did librarians take on to aid the war effort, and how did

their professional journals help them in their efforts? And finally, what role did the

discussions in the professional journals play in the development of the post-war library

world?

Library Journal was founded in 1876 as the mouthpiece for the library associations

of the United States and the United Kingdom and Canada. While the British librarians

went on to found their own journals, Library Journal has always embraced a transnational

image of librarianship. Traditionally viewed as one of the popular magazines of the

profession, it can give an idea of what the collective profession was experiencing. While

Library Journal represents the field of librarianship as it is, A.L.A. Bulletin shows a vision

of the field as it could be. The A.L.A. Bulletin, first published in 1907, is the forerunner of

the modern American Libraries magazine. Where Library Journal became more

independent of the library associations, as evidenced by the title, the A.L.A. Bulletin was

the official journal of the ALA. Most of its articles are the result of conference

presentations while Library Journal tends to deal with more popular topics intended for

librarians to implement immediately. Of course, wartime significantly upended the general

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structures of both journals, and the journals’ responsiveness to the needs of their readership

is another interesting part to this complex story.

Historiography

When examining American librarians’ responses to the wartime impact on libraries,

one must take a slightly creative approach to the historiography. The literature tends to

take two divergent paths. First, scholars have focused on the actual destruction of libraries

around the world. This has been the most widely studied aspect of the history of libraries

during the Second World War, though even coverage of this area pales in comparison to

the work that has been done to document the Nazi looting of museums and of Europe’s

gold, jewels, and especially art. Books are often left as a footnote to the tales of cultural

loss. Even though they are a historian’s primary tools, it is the shinier, more valuable

objects that attract the public’s attention. Second, there has been some effort by the library

profession to document the roles of wartime librarians. Many librarians lost their lives

alongside the millions killed during World War II, and many more risked their lives to

protect their libraries and to continue to serve the public. Even through the Blitz in England

and the Nazi occupation of much of mainland Europe, the librarians kept up their work,

providing information and escape from the realities of war through the power of fiction.

Hilda Urén Stubbings’s Blitzkrieg and Books: British and European Libraries as

Casualties of World War II is the most comprehensive work that focuses primarily on the

destruction of European libraries during the Second World War. Stubbings approaches the

topic country-by-country, recounting the stories of how books were lost in Poland,

Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Britain, Italy, and Germany. In most

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cases two chapters are devoted to each country, the first giving a description of the prewar

country and then giving a history of its experiences during the war. She finally addresses

the wartime experiences of librarians and libraries in the second of the chapters. Stubbings

spends significant time discussing the disproportionate attention given to art, precious

metals, and jewels, the targets of Nazi treasure hunters. She points out that American

soldiers also found books in Nazi hordes of loot and that, in fact, books drew quite a bit of

Nazi attention. The Bibliotheksschutz were tasked with purging library collections of items

contradicting Nazi ideology and after the war the Americans repatriated some three million

books to their rightful owners.1 Though not well received by reviewers- Stubbings is not a

historian- her book remains the most comprehensive look at the European wartime

experience of libraries and librarians in World War II.

Moving beyond the exclusive realm of World War II, in Libricide: The Regime-

Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, Rebecca Knuth

examines a wide variety of regime-sponsored books burnings and gives special attention to

the actions of the Nazis before and during World War II.2 Knuth defines libricide as

“large-scale, regime-sanctioned destruction of books and libraries, purposeful initiatives

that were designed to advance short- and long-term ideologically driven goals.”3 Unlike

Stubbings, she forwards a thesis that connects book burning to the destruction of culture

and as a precursor to genocide. Stubbings merely reported on what she found- Knuth does

1 Hilda Urén Stubbings, Blitzkrieg and Books: British and European Libraries as Casualties of World War II (Bloomington, IN: Rubena Press, 1993).

2 Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

3 Ibid., viii.

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the work of a true historian and asks questions of the information that she finds. For Knuth,

the destruction of books has a purpose. She writes that when the Nazis destroyed libraries

across Europe, they were massacring knowledge as part of their ambition to create a

homogeneous Aryan state. Knuth recognizes that the loss is not merely a monetary one, but

rather one that spans generations as librarians and archivists strive to piece together the

remains and once again offer them up for scholars’ use. Though World War II is only

covered in one chapter, Knuth makes the crucial contribution of placing the destruction of

libraries within the discussion of the impact of war on culture. In her later book, Burning

Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, Knuth

expands her earlier work, including more instances of twentieth century destruction, but

she offers very few new observations on World War II.4 Indeed, her discussion of World

War II only revisits Kristallnacht in 1938, a topic she already discussed in Libricide.

Moving even further beyond the scope of the Second World War, Lucien

Polastron’s Books on Fire, translated from its original French by Jon E. Graham, offers a

more expansive history of the destruction of libraries and books throughout time and

across geography.5 Written in response to the burning of the National Library in Sarajevo

in the 1990s and the destruction of the Iraqi national library during the invasion of Iraq in

2003, Polastron covers the destruction of books throughout time while giving some

attention to the devastation of World War II. He especially laments the destruction of 20

million books in the Blitz and he draws attention to German soldiers’ use of Russian

4 Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

5 Polastron, Books on Fire.

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encyclopedias to pave the way over muddy roads. But Polastron is more indignant over the

more purposeful destruction of libraries. He especially condemns the BrandKammando,

soldiers whose mission it was to burn libraries. Like Knuth, Polastron is highly aware of

the cultural significance of book burning. He poignantly writes that “the book is the double

of the man, and burning it is the equivalent of killing him.”6

In A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to

Modern Iraq, Fernando Báez presents an even more extensive history of burned books than

Lucien Polastron.7 Originally written in Spanish and translated to English by Alfred

MacAdam, Báez wrote the book after visiting the ruins of destroyed and looted libraries in

Iraq. Báez explains, “The book is an institution of memory…Books are not destroyed as

physical objects but as links to memory, that is, as one of the axes of identity of a person or

a community. There is no identity without memory…At the root of book destruction is the

intent to induce historical amnesia that facilitates control of an individual or a society.”8

Like Knuth and Polastron, Báez recognizes the impact of book burning on the cultures

whose books are burned. However, Báez does not fully stress the destruction of World War

II. He focuses most of his attention on the prewar Nazi book burnings but then largely

overlooks the other examples of book burning throughout the war. It is clear that he wishes

to shock his audience with stories of wanton destruction, and he missed several

opportunities by neglecting the Second World War.

6 Ibid., x.

7 Fernando Báez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Atlas, 2008).

8 Ibid., 12.

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One must understand the historiography of the destruction of libraries more

generally in order to appreciate the response to the level of destruction in World War II.

On the brink of war, librarians were well aware of the dangers war could pose to their

collections. After all, moving entire libraries was a much more momentous task than

ferreting away art collections, and in many cases the collections could not be moved

because they were still needed. An art museum can be closed for the duration of a war with

only some regret, but libraries are much more important not only for the information they

contain, but for their immediate, portable morale-boosting capabilities. There are reasons

that with the outbreak of war, librarians started book-collecting campaigns in order to have

reading material to send to the soldiers on the front. The history of the destruction of books

served as a warning to librarians of what could happen to their own collections, and so on

the brink of war librarians around the world began their plans for continuing to serve the

public while protecting the most valuable items of their collections. Many of their lessons

were learned from the destruction of the library at Louvain.

Matthew Battles’s article “Knowledge on Fire” explores the two destructions of the

library at the University of Louvain in Belgium. The two destructions still resonate through

library history in the present day, and so understanding the story behind the destruction is

crucial. Battles’s account stands out due to his investigation into the cause for the

destruction of Louvain. He details the opposing stories concerning the 1914 destruction,

concluding that the library was burned along with the city as a way for the Germans to

make an example to other towns in Belgium. Importantly for the rest of his narrative,

Battles includes the story of the rebuilding of the library and the debate over the design.

Paid for with American donations, the architect intended for the library to be a monument

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to the war that chastised the Germans. The university rector objected, however, insisting on

a more neutral design. Battles then moves forward to the Second World War and offers the

varying accounts of why the library was destroyed a second time. He reveals that the

Germans used the tower of the library as an artillery target as they approached the city, but

afterwards they sought to blame the British for the destruction. Battles cannot draw

conclusions about why the Germans tried to blame the British, but he does offer reasons

for the targeting of the library. First, many of the books used to refurbish the library had

been taken from German libraries after the First World War. And second, witnesses

claimed that the Germans believed that the library had been built to its original plan, the

plan that represented Allied victory and German shame. By targeting the library, they

literally blasted away history.

Battles then looks back at the Nazi book burnings. He admits that Nazi officials

were not the instigators in the first burnings in 1933, but they quickly co-opted the student

actions, offering lists of suggested books to be collected and burned. As part of the Nazis’

war on culture, countless thousands of books were burned by the Germans in addition to

the destruction of murals, the hounding of college professors, and the closing of art

museums. As the war started, German librarians assisted the military in compiling lists of

books to be targeted when invading new territories. Millions of books were destroyed, but

millions were also stolen, selected by specialized German units to be brought back for

Germany’s libraries. Battles concludes by bringing the story forward to the present,

mentioning the destruction of the Bosnian national library and the cultural losses in the

invasion of Iraq.9 While Battles’s accounts of the purposeful destruction of books in World

9 Matthew Battles, “Knowledge on Fire,” American Scholar 72, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 35-52.

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War II is admirable, he falls short of describing the full extent of the loss. Millions of

books were selectively stolen and destroyed by the Germans, but millions more were

accidental casualties of the war, victims of Axis and Allied forces alike.

Before one can move on to the works written by librarians and about libraries, one

must confront the most popular book on the prevention of wartime destruction: Robert

Edsel’s The Monuments Men. For much of the American public, The Monuments Men has

become their reference point for the impact of World War II on cultural artifacts. The book

is only likely to continue to affect interested Americans since it is due to be translated as a

major Hollywood motion picture in 2014. Edsel reveals the story of the U.S. Army’s

Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section and the men and women across Europe who

saved and recovered thousands of art works and monuments from Nazi destruction. The

book has drawn much popular attention to the danger war poses to a country’s intellectual

treasures. But while Edsel focuses his attention on the Rembrandts and cathedrals of

Europe, he neglects the millions of books that were not saved by the Monuments Men.10

That story is left for others to tell, and a librarian and an archivist have stepped up to the

challenge.

Kathy Peiss’s article “Cultural Policy in a Time of War: The American Response to

Endangered Books in World War II” fills in parts of the story that Edsel neglects. She

explains that the Second World War was the first U.S. war in which the protection of

books and other artifacts became an official aim of the war.11 She details the events that led

10 Robert Edsel and Bret Witter, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (New York: Center Street, 2009).11 Kathy Peiss, “Cultural Policy in a Time of War: The American Response to Endangered Books in World War II,” Library Trends 55, No. 3 (Winter 2007): 370-386.

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General Dwight D. Eisenhower to issue a directive for the protection of books and other

cultural resources and gives credit to American intellectual elites for being aware of the

potential threat and to their connections within the federal government. She also points out

that Fascist radio broadcasts declared Americans to be barbarians who, once they entered

the war, would care nothing for Europe’s cultural treasures and would pillage and destroy

everything in their path. In fact, Americans had been horrified by the destruction of

Louvain in 1914, and news of Nazi book burnings before the war spurred a legion of

librarians and archivists into action to protect American books. But American interests in

books went further, and Eisenhower’s directive was also meant to disprove the Fascists’

broadcasts. Here Peiss expands the story of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives

(MFAA) section to include the books they were also charged with protecting and saving.

She reveals the efforts of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to gather copies of books,

pamphlets, magazines, and other printed paraphernalia and make microfilm copies. While

originally done for intelligence purposes, the OSS in fact saved many obscure works

published during the war, including resistance newspapers, from disappearing from the

human record. Peiss concludes with the story of the MFAA’s efforts to retrieve and

repatriate books after the war and challenges current library professionals to take heed of

the lessons learned during the Second World War.

Eleanor Mattern’s article “World War II Archivists: In the Field and on the Home

Front” also expands on the story of the MFAA. While Mattern makes many of the same

points as Peiss, she takes the narrative another step and includes many instances of the

MFAA’s work to safeguard archival collections. She also fills in further gaps by

identifying key figures on the American home front who promoted the MFAA and who

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kept Congress aware of its actions and importance. Her stories of American and British

archivists recruited by the MFAA further fill in the story of the Monuments Men begun by

Edsel and Peiss.12

While there is room left for scholars to explore the impact of the libraries lost in

World War II, the American response to that destruction could also use more work. The

destruction of libraries in Europe not only saddened Americans, it also prompted action by

librarians. Under the auspices of the American Library Association, libraries across the

country put together policies that could be implemented in the event of an air attack or

invasion. But the American response did not limit itself to American soil. American

librarians, alongside intellectuals from various fields, were also concerned about the fate of

European treasures and encouraged the government to pass policies supporting the

protection of European works of art and other cultural treasures, including books. These

strategies and plans have drawn the interest of a range of American librarians, who study

the topic to both record the actions of the predecessors and to encourage the profession to

consider the continued threats posed to library collections.

In Books and Libraries in American Society During World War II: Weapons in the

War of Ideas, Patti Clayton Becker looks at the American home front and especially at the

way the American Library Association structured itself as part of the war effort. She

reveals that the executive director of the ALA, Carl Milam, and the Librarian of Congress

Archibald MacLeish were quick to align themselves with President Roosevelt’s policies

during the years leading up to the war. They remembered the importance of libraries to the

12 Eleanor Mattern, “World War II Archivists: In the Field and on the Home Front,” Library & Archival Security 24, no. 2 (2011): 61-81.

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home front during the last world war, and their foresight put America’s public libraries in a

position to be ready to serve the public during World War II. While the library did gain

more prestige and importance in the eyes of the public, it was not quite in the way Milam

envisioned. The ALA faltered in membership numbers during the war because patrons did

not come to the libraries seeking the educational experience that Milam had hoped for.

While the ALA’s publications continued to stress the importance of wartime education in

the public library, America’s public libraries were in fact being used as an escape from the

traumas of war through recreational reading. Though Becker never quite makes it to the

story implied by her title, her work is important because it reveals the inner workings of

the ALA in wartime.13

Brett Spencer’s “Preparing for an Air Attack: Libraries and the American Air Raid

Defense During World War II” explores the more physical response to the threat of the war

reaching American soil. He writes that when American librarians heard about Nazi raids

that damaged British libraries, they went into a frenzy of information gathering on how to

protect their own libraries and made lists of items that needed the most protection. The

Library of Congress took notes from the British Library and the Louvre in its efforts to

defend against potential Nazi bombing campaigns. University libraries across the nation

developed contingency plans to complete evacuate their special collections over the course

of a day if bombing appeared imminent. Air raid defense was not just a matter of

protecting libraries, however. Spencer explains that libraries also developed information

centers for the public and provided the latest air defense information. Librarians also

offered up their physical buildings as meeting places for local civil defense committees and

13 Patti Clayton Becker, Books and Libraries in American Society During World War II: Weapons in the War of Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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even as community bomb shelters. After the example of Europe, American libraries were

prepared for the destruction that never came, but in the meantime, Spencer argues, the

library became more firmly established in the American mind as a community necessity.14

The Burning of the Books- 1933

American librarians may have had a personal awareness of the takeover of the Nazi

regime in Germany, but the first professional recognition came in 1933. While the book

burnings of 1933 would later be attributed solely to the Nazi regime, it was actually started

by the German Student Association under the guidance of Nazi officials. The party

controlled the speeches and held the reigns, but the German Student Association, the actual

students who used the libraries that were culled, were the boots on the ground. On April 6,

1933, the German Student Association called for the destruction of books that did not align

with their principles as part of their “Action against the un-German spirit” campaign. In the

Twelve Theses, purposefully invoking Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, they went on to call for

a purification of the German language and a cleansing of German literature from the taint

14 Brett Spencer, “Preparing for an Air Attack: Libraries and the American Air Raid Defense During World War II,” Libraries & The Cultural Record 43, No. 2 (2008): 125-147.

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Figure 1: Berlin, Opernplatz, Bücherverbrennung. Students burning books in Berlin, 10 May 1933. From the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

of “Jewish intellectualism.” Universities, they insisted, should be devoted to the building

and support of German nationalism.15

On May 10, 1933, the German Student Association burned over 25,000 “un-

German” books across Germany as they marched with torches and sang songs. They lit

bonfires and jubilantly threw books into the fire as bands played and crowds cheered.

Association members invited Nazi leaders to speak.16 In Berlin, the demonstrations took

15 Frederick T. Birchall, “Nazi Book-Burning Fails to Stir Berlin,” The New York Times, May 11, 1933.

16 Ibid.

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place on the Openplatz, and Joseph Goebbels was the chosen speaker. In his fiery speech,

he insisted that

“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The

breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German

path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of

character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to

already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death,

and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus

you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the

past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document

the following for the world to know…from this wreckage the phoenix of a new

spirit will triumphantly rise.”17

Fires continued to burn across Germany throughout May and June as students at

thirty four universities heeded the call to cast off the “un-German spirit.” German

newspapers hailed their actions and Berlin radio broadcasted the speeches and songs across

the nation. Using a list compiled by German librarian Wolfgang Herrmann, the books the

students consigned to the flames were the works of noted socialists Brecht and Bebel and

the founder of communism, Karl Marx. Foreign works by Ernest Hemingway, Helen

Keller, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Leo Tolstoy, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Jack London

were amongst many others that had once been welcomed by German students to be burned

17 Joseph Goebbels speech in “Der Vollzug des Volkswillens: Undeutsches Schrifftum auf dem Scheiterhauten, Nächtliche Kundgebung der deutschen Studentenschaft,” Völkischer Beobachter, 12 May 1933, translated by Hugo S. Cunningham, http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/volkisch.html .

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at the hands of German students.18 Significantly, works by Jews were burned

indiscriminately, including works by the poet Heinrich Heine, who had warned in the

nineteenth century, “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”19 The

long years of Nazi censorship and state controlled culture had begun.

Curiously enough, there is no direct reference to Germany’s book burnings in either

of the professional library journals until the next year, 1934. There are articles by German

librarians and articles about German libraries in the 1933 issues, but if the American

library community ground to a halt and vociferously protested, it is not reflected here. In

Library Journal librarians on both sides of the Atlantic were complaining about the high

price of German science periodicals and proposing ways to fix the problem.20 In the

September issue of the A.L.A. Bulletin, it was announced by the ALA that Hugo A. Krüss,

the director general of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, would attend the annual ALA

Conference alongside librarians from other countries. His ticket was paid for by a grant

from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation.21

There is one timely book review of a book called Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in

British History and Literature in the A.L.A. Bulletin. Admittedly the review could have

been sent to press before May 10 since this is in the October issue, but there is no mention

18 Matthew Battles, “Knowledge on Fire,” American Scholar 72, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 35-52.

19 Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 142.

20 Charles H. Brown, “German Periodicals in American Libraries: Deflation or Extinction?” The Library Journal 58, no. 18 (June 15, 1933): 525-528; “Editorials” Ibid., 544-545.

21 “Foreign Representation at the A.L.A. Conference,” A.L.A. Bulletin 27, no. 9 (September 1933): 348.

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of Germany here. The review doggedly sticks to Britain with no comments on any books

ever burned outside of Britain, present or past.22

Given the frequency of publications and the fact that most issues include rather

recent news, the lack of mention about the books burnings in Germany in 1933 is a

mystery. Librarians would have certainly been aware of the events since it was covered in

the major national newspapers. On 5 May, alongside reports that the Nazis planned to seize

Austria and a notice for an Anti-Hitler march planned for 10 May that expected 200,000

participants, The New York Times warned that the Nazis planned to purge their libraries.

The story explained: “Numerous books by ‘Marxist’ or Jewish authors have already been

received by the Berlin section of German students, who, in the course of the campaign

against ‘the un-German spirit’ have appealed to the public to surrender all writings of this

kind. They will be publicly burned May 10 in the square opposite Berlin University in

Unter den Linden.”23 The next day another article reported that works by Helen Keller and

Jack London would be included amongst those of 160 authors. Librarians who participated

in aiding the students would receive the honor of being included on a list of dependable

libraries, and while private homes would not be raided, it was suggested that families leave

“poisoned literature” on their doorsteps.24 When the day of the burnings arrived, The New

York Times ran Helen Keller’s letter to the German students in which she told them,

22 Theodore W. Koch, Review of Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature by Charles Ripley Gillet, A.L.A. Bulletin 27, No. 10 (October 1933): 401-402.

23 “Nazis Want Drama on Olympic Card,” New York Times, May 5, 1933.

24 Guido Enderis, “Nazi Fires to Get 160 Writers’ Books,” The New York Times, May 6, 1933.

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“History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.”25 In spite of the rain that

dampened the full scale of the book burnings across Germany, the paper goes on to report

that the publicity stunt was successful and it continued to run stories registering various

groups’ disapproval. Again, while the professional library literature does not reflect a

reaction by American librarians, they would certainly have known about it. Perhaps the

professional journals felt that this sort of event was beyond their purview. Perhaps they

wished to retain their relationships with their German counterparts. Regardless of the

reasons, the coming war would change the scope of what was covered and included in

American library journals.

There is finally a brief acknowledgment of the burned books in the 1 June 1934

issue of Library Journal. There, in 120 words, is a notice about the opening of The

German Library of the Burned Books in Paris on the first anniversary of the 10 May

burnings in the presence of refugee authors. Its shelves were filled with 20,000 books and

pamphlets that “bear a silent witness to the high distinction of the works which good

Hitlerites must not read.” Devoted to research by historians, students, writers, and

sociologists, the library committee declared, “It stands for the fact that, although the Nazis

can burn books, they cannot destroy freedom of thought or the great teachings of the

past.”26 It appears that the memory of the burned books would not ignite a fire in the

professional literature until the true scope of Nazism became more apparent during the

war.

25 “Helen Keller Warns Germany’s Students; Says Burning of Books Cannot Kill Ideas,” The New York Times, May 10, 1933.

26 “German Library of Burned Books,” The Library Journal 59, no. 12 (June 1, 1934): 470.

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1939- The War Arrives

If the average librarian depended on Library Journal or the A.L.A. Bulletin in 1939

for her outside news, she probably felt that war would never reach American shores. While

Hitler had been a menacing shadow over Europe for most of the decade, American

librarians could not have predicted Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939,

especially not based on the articles in their professional journals, anyway. While publishers

advertised books about the increasingly hostile and menacing Third Reich, there is no

indication in the literature that suggests that the world was once more on the brink of war.

Nevertheless, Britain offered an ultimatum, giving Germany until 11:00 am British

Standard Time on 3 September to withdraw troops from Poland. When that deadline

passed, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain took to the BBC to announce that Britain was

at war with Germany. Canada followed the rest of the Commonwealth into the war on

Germany on 10 September. The US, however, declared neutrality. The growing war in

Europe was not yet their war. So while British librarians began their plans to secure their

libraries and dusted off old plans from the Great War, American librarians were still

concerned with developing their collections on gardening.27

Not all American librarians were ignorant of the impending threat, however. While

there was no oracle shouting prophecy between articles on gardening books and best

practices for collection development, there was a growing sense of paranoia about

propaganda. Articles appeared in Library Journal warning librarians to take heed and

carefully weed their collections of anything that challenged democracy. They were advised

27 The Library Journal 65, no. 5 (March 1940).

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on how to identify propaganda. Librarians also reiterated the importance of books to

democracy. In “Power of Books in a Democracy,” Mrs. Evelyn Steele Little reminded

librarians of the importance of supporting a diverse collection. Though the librarian may

not agree with the content of a book, Mrs. Little urged the wary librarian to consider the

advantages of reading controversial works. She also recollected the Nazi book burnings of

1933 and referenced the totalitarian control over the press in Nazi Germany.28 Again, as

evidenced by the newspaper reports surrounding the book burnings in 1933, librarians

would not have been ignorant of what was going on in Europe. What is curious is that the

professional journals project a sense of ignorance. Perhaps, though, this may have been

wishful thinking. Other than the threat of propaganda, the war in Europe was not yet the

war in America. While tragedies were occurring in Europe, American librarians had to

continue on with business as usual.

1940- The World At War

By 1940, American librarians could no longer ignore the situation in Europe.

Germany quickly moved to attack Denmark and Norway, followed by Belgium, the

Netherlands, and France, which all fell quickly to Germany’s fighting forces. Secure in

continental Europe, Hitler turned his attention to the jewel in the crown: Britain. The

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are storied with tales of British and German friendship

as the German born House of Hanover ruled Britain and consecutive monarchs married

German born princesses and princes. Even before the eighteenth century the British and the

Germans had been united as Protestant countries against a largely Catholic Europe. That

28 Evelyn Steele Little, “The Power of Books in a Democracy,” The Library Journal 64, no. 11 (June 1939): 441-445.

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relationship had, of course, unraveled during the Great War, but Hitler hoped to one day

mend their differences. He was convinced that if he did not humiliate or destroy Britain, he

could see his new European empire and Britain’s old empire of the sea reach a point of

cooperation for mutual benefit.29 Coaxing Britain into submission did not go quite as Hitler

had planned, however.

The Battle of Britain began in the late summer of 1940. From the very beginning it

depended heavily on the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, to clear the way for a ground

invasion. The Kanalkampf, or Channel Battle, lasted from 10 July until early August.

German bombers flew across the Channel to bomb England’s southern coast and later the

mouth of the Thames. As bombs fell on Dover, Weymouth, Portsmouth, and other ports

perched among the white cliffs, the cover of the July issue of Library Journal featured a

quote by John W. Studebaker, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, that was included in

nearly every edition until the end of the war in 1945: “When people are burning books in

other parts of the world, we ought to be distributing them with greater vigor, for books are

among our best allies in the fight to make democracy work.”30 As librarians on the coast of

Britain struggled to keep their libraries open in spite of the danger of the bombs, American

librarians were quick to offer their sympathy, and as will be seen in later editions of the

professional literature, they were also willing to learn from British experiences.31

29 John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin, 1990), 95.

30 Cover, The Library Journal 65, no. 13

31 Edith Young, “A Library in War-Time,” The Library Journal 66, no. 1 (January 1941): 27-28.

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Meanwhile, American librarians were also aware of what was happening in

mainland Europe, not just in Britain. They had heard the news that the library of Louvain

had once again been burned, and they knew many librarians would find themselves in

sticky situations as they were forced to turn over their libraries to the hands of Nazis who

would in turn decimate their collections. At least some European librarians took the

opportunity to flee the war. In response, the A.L.A. Bulletin ran a letter from the ALA

Committee to Aid Refugee Librarians. The letter explained the purpose of the committee,

primarily to provide relief and assistance to librarians escaping war and totalitarianism in

Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Denmark. The committee

encouraged libraries, especially at the university level, to aid their fellow librarians by

finding them temporary positions for the duration of the war.32

While the Germans did wreck destruction on the towns and shipping trade, they did

not achieve their goal of weakening the Royal Navy. They had reached an aerial stalemate,

and so beginning in August Hitler ordered Operation Eagle to commence. The Luftwaffe

received orders to attack the Royal Air Force directly in the air and overcome them in fast

paced aerial battles. Again, things did not go according to Germany’s plans, and they were

soon changing their offensive strategy once more. From 26 August to 6 September the

Luftwaffe attacked Britain’s Fighter Command’s airfields before shifting to the Battle of

London from 7 to 30 September. During that offensive effort the Luftwaffe’s fighter planes

guided bombers on daylight raids, but by the end of October they were weakened to the

point of having to only fly at night. This period, known to the British as the Blitz, was

32 “Refugee Librarians,” The A.L.A. Bulletin 34, no. 7 (July 1940): 178.

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highly destructive, but still not as strategically efficient as the Germans had hoped. In

attacking Britain, Hitler was faced with his first significant defeat.33

Meanwhile, the United States was still not ready to go to war. Though their support

of Britain was an open secret and many American hearts bled to hear of the 40,000 lives

lost in the Blitz, many still felt that the war in Europe was not an American fight.34 While

the United States made efforts to maintain its neutrality, the ALA found itself doing the

same thing. The ALA made the point of clarifying its voice in all matters concerning the

war. When the Progressive Librarians’ Council passed a resolution to urge Roosevelt to

avoid war at all costs, the ALA stepped in to assure its members and the nation at large that

the PLC did not represent the 17,000 members of the ALA.35 The ALA would take stands

against the burning of books and was clearly in favor of democracy, but it would not

extend beyond the purview of librarianship and make calls for war or for peace.

By September 1940, all of Europe was firmly entrenched in the war, and France

had been in Germany’s hands for some months. In the September edition of Library

Journal, the evacuation of the American Library in Paris was discussed at some length. As

the Germans approached Paris, the librarians had been determined to stay at the library as

long as possible, though many of their staff had already evacuated. Part of the their

contingency plan was to join the hospital evacuees to Angoulème. As things grew critical

in Paris, the two head librarians, Evangeline Turnbull and Dorothy Reeder, finally found a

taxi that could take them to Angoulème, but they found they were only in the way there,

33 Keegan, 94.

34 Ibid., 100.

35 “Repudiation by A.L.A.” in “Library World News,” The Library Journal 65, no. 13 (July 1940): 399.

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and so they decided to move out of France. The librarians evacuated to London on June 12,

but according to Library Journal, they returned to Paris on July 22. Their eagerness to

keep the American Library in Paris open to the public, regardless of the situations

surrounding them, was heavily applauded by the editors of Library Journal. Let this be an

example, they said.36

The October 1940 Library Journal includes the first mention of American libraries

beginning to prepare for the possibility of war. Given that news of the war had finally

reached the practical articles of the professional literature, one must realize that by late

1940 American librarians across the nation were starting to feel some concern. The

administration of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino,

California, urges the readers to begin photographing their collections and storing the copies

in separate locations from the originals.37 While war on American soil is still viewed as a

remote possibility, the war in Europe was already heightening American librarians’

awareness of the fragility of their paper collections. News of libraries being destroyed in

the Blitz, including some irreplaceable items, drove American librarians and archivists to

embrace microfilm technology on new levels to preserve the information held in their

collections into perpetuity.

1941- The Realities of War

The Blitz continued into 1941. While British forces confronted the Germans in

Africa and the Italians in Greece, even Buckingham Palace was not spared by the

36 “American Library in Paris,” The Library Journal 65, no. 15 (September 1940): 600.

37 “Need for Safety Measures,” The Library Journal 65, no. 17 (October 1940): 774.

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Luftwaffe’s night raids, sustaining damage on 8 March. Library Journal’s January 1941

begins with a dim note in the form of an article entitled “A Library in War Time.” Written

by Edith Young, a British assistant librarian in Brighton, it describes the efforts of keeping

a library open during the Battle of Britain. Indeed, as she wrote the letter she could hear a

dogfight occurring overhead, and at one point she paused when she heard a bomb fall,

though luckily that one fell into the sea. She explains the library’s procedures for blackouts

and the process her library took to convert the working library into an air raid shelter. She

writes that the library had become a true community center, provided First Aid and gas

exams in addition to hosting a mid-wifery course- as she points out, just in case. The

librarians converted one of their basements into a public shelter, which she reports was full

every night of people from the bombed parts of Brighton, and in her words, “during the

day when things get too hot overhead.”38 As 1941 progressed, the war was becoming more

real to American librarians, and its existence could no longer be completely ignored by the

professional journals. Even in the beginning of 1941, one begins to see the publishing

industry’s response to the war in Europe, and the book lists only grew and the war

continued. In the advertisements in both Library Journal and the A.L.A. Bulletin, libraries

are encouraged to purchase books about the “Second European War” and the “Defense of

America.”39

In an update on the American Library in Paris, librarians learned that after the

American librarians returned to Paris in July 1940, the Germans allowed them to reopen in

38 Edith Young, “A Library in War-Time,” The Library Journal 66, no. 1 (January 1941): 27-28.

39 “Advertisements,” The Library Journal 66, no. 1 (January 1941): 32-33; “Books for Sale,” A.L.A. Bulletin 34, no. 1 (January 1941): 13-14.

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the library on September 16, 1940. The library was placed under the protection of the

American Embassy and German officials were anxious that it should stay open to the

public. At least at this point in the war, at least, operations at the library were allowed to

continue, with one caveat: librarians were given a list of books by the Germans that had to

be placed in a secure location and they would only be available to researchers with “some

particularly good reason.” A letter from Dorothy Reeder, the head librarian at the library

reported that the library was running on limited hours since it was now short staffed, but it

was making the effort to deliver books to prisoners of war. The Rockefeller Foundation

pledged $25,000 to the library, seeing it as a way to aide the people of France without

further provoking the Nazi regime.40

Meanwhile, the United States made its first tangible move toward supporting the

Allied forces and ending its neutrality. On 11 March 1941, President Franklin Delano

Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into law. Officially titled An Act to Further Promote

the Defense of the United States, the bill provided the mechanism by which the U.S.

government could supply materials to Britain and China, and later the Soviet Union, Free

France, and other Allied nations. The countries were allowed to borrow supplies with the

promise to repay the United States after an Allied victory.41 The United States also took a

more active role in its defenses starting in April 1941 by operating the Neutrality Patrol.

Enacting the Pan-American Neutrality Act of 1939, the United States issued a ban to all U-

boats from the U.S. coast to Bermuda. As British convoys experienced more success in

transporting goods (aided by escorts from the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet), the Germans

40 “The American Library in Paris,” The Library Journal 66, no. 1 (January 1941): 5.

41 Keegan, 112.

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lost more U-boats, and as the U.S. Navy “became an overt combatant rather than a hostile

neutral,” the Germans began focusing more of their U-boat patrols on the U.S. coast in

September 1941.42 For a country not at war, the United States engaged in quite a bit of

warlike behavior.

In May 1941, editors stressed the important role librarians had in national defense.

While they were perhaps not staked out on the coast looking for U-boats, librarians needed

“to give wholehearted support to the defense program, without losing sight of regular

obligations to our communities, to contribute effectively to present needs, yet to build for

an even more significant role in the peace to come.” It was noted that President Roosevelt

had called on Americans to support a “total effort” for a “total victory” for the democracies

of the world when the Lend-Lease Bill was signed into action, and the editors suggested

that a declaration of war would make little difference if librarians were already seeking this

goal. They admit that the ALA had been criticized in previous months for becoming “too

war conscious.”

42 Ibid.

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Figure 2: Library After Air Raid, London, 1940 © Archive of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.

This lends some credence to the idea that at least some librarians believed that if the United

States was not engaged in the war, the American Library Association should not be

involved either. In the end the editors defend the ALA for being “war conscious” as it had

allowed them to develop policies and programs that would now aid President Roosevelt’s

call to action. They called for librarians to engage in “active, even aggressive

librarianship” as they encouraged their patrons to read American history and other works

that would remind them of the importance of democracy in such times.43

43 Editorial Forum, “National Defense—and Beyond,” The Library Journal 66, no. 7 (May 1941): 448-449.

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It took several months for Britain to calculate its losses from the Battle of Britain,

but by June 1941, Library Journal and the A.L.A. Bulletin were reporting on the losses

from the Blitz. The loss of human life had been tremendous with 40,000 people dead, but

the loss of generations of scholarly work was also great. The journals report that in London

alone, six million books had been lost. Among the destroyed books were the Scandinavian

collection at University College, the Moscatta Library and Museum of Anglo-Judaica

which contained over 100,000 volumes, 7000 books at King’s College, 25,000 at the

Guildhall, and 20,000 books at Hinet Public Library. In Manchester the bombs took a

further 50,000 volumes from the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and the

National Library for the Blind had lost 300 Braille books. The Library of the Birmingham

National History and Philosophical Society, like much of Birmingham in general, was

reported as a total loss.44 Both journals published letters from librarians in England who

report that thousands of books from their collections had been lost when patrons’ homes

were bombed. Such daily destruction added a new duty to a librarian’s job specifications as

he or she now had to keep lists of which patrons had lost their homes or lives so as to avoid

any inappropriate reminders about returning books to the library.45

Up until April 1941, American librarians had little news about their colleagues in

German occupied countries. While he does not make it clear how he obtained it, librarian

Magnus Kristoffersen from Nebraska shared information about the libraries of Denmark

gleaned from a speech given to the Association of Librarians in Copenhagen by a Dr. G.

44 “The War on Books” in “Library World News,” The Library Journal 66, no. 12 (June 1941): 515-516.

45 Edith Young, “A Library in War-Time,” The Library Journal 66, no. 1 (January 1941): 27-28.

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Krogh-Jensen. Kristoffersen wrote that the German occupation had been difficult, but

library readership reached record numbers after the occupation began. Needing to escape

from their own harsh realities, the Danish people turned to fiction. Kristoffersen took the

opportunity to encourage his fellow American librarians to keep this in mind when they

built their own collections- that reading is as much about escape as it is about relaxation

and enjoyment.46

While the American professional journals’ attention was fixed on the war in

Europe, there was another threat brewing across the Pacific. Japan had been at war with

China for several years, and occupied the Chinese territory of Manchuria. Seeking to

expand further into the Pacific region and gain the natural resources the tiny island nation

needed in order to sustain its growing empire, Japan first had to neutralize the threats posed

by the colonial powers of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States.

When the Japanese invaded French Indochina in 1940, the United States had curtailed its

imports to Japan, which created much resentment among the Japanese. Still wanting to

expand their empire, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarter only saw one way

forward. In the early morning of 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched

an aerial attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.47

The war had officially come to the United States, and the next day, on 8 December

1942, the United States declared war on Japan. Due to Japanese attacks on Malaya,

Singapore, and Hong Kong, the British declared war on Japan on the same day. Overnight

46 Magnus K. Kristoffersen, “Libraries in Denmark,” The Library Journal 66, no. 7 (April 1941): 319-320.

47 Keegan, 250-256.

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the remaining neutrality sentiment in the United States had largely disappeared from the

American people’s minds, and the United States became even more open in its support of

Great Britain. By 11 December, Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States,

and the United States returned the favor. The United States, which had long been a

“clandestine” friend of the Allies, had now truly entered the Second World War.48

On December 15, 1941, one finds the first call for a National Defense Book

Campaign to provide reading materials for soldiers.49 The American librarians would still

have many lessons to learn about providing services during wartime, but they at least

understood the value of a good book. Having heard from their European colleagues that

soldiers and civilians alike were drawn to fiction in difficult times, American librarians

were quick to join the war effort and send their soldiers off to war with the best books

America had to offer.

1942- America at War

From the very first article in the January issues of the A.L.A. Bulletin and Library

Journal, it is clear that American librarians had learned to do more than just collect books

for soldiers. The articles detailing the experiences of their European colleagues may have

been scarce, but the librarians had clearly learned from them, and the journals made up for

lost time once the war was officially an American war. There was an immediate call by the

ALA for all libraries to become bureaus of ready information on what to do in the event of

blackouts and attacks. The Blitz in London was taken as a warning- if it could happen

48 Ibid., 310-311.

49 “National Defense Book Campaign,” The Library Journal 66, no. 22 (December 1941): 1042.

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there, it could happen on American shores. Wartime brought the very real threat of aerial

and coastal attacks. The U.S. Navy diligently combed American waters, guarding against

attacks by German U-Boats. While many Americans were looking for the best ways they

could be of help to the war effort, Library Journal and the A.L.A. Bulletin were quick to

assure their librarians that their greatest contribution would be to continue serving as

librarians. Their first task as wartime librarians would be to tailor their ready reference

sections to educate their patrons on how to prepare for the real possibilities of the war

reaching American shores. Librarians were told that they would be helping the soldiers by

helping their families at home. Throughout 1942, librarians were constantly reminded to

maintain up-to-date collections on the latest safety procedures and methods. They were

also encouraged to increase the technology information section of the library.

The United States did not enter the European theatre of the war immediately.

Rather, they focused their efforts on the Pacific where they had been attacked by Japan. In

late spring of 1942, the U.S. and Japan engaged in several naval battles which climaxed in

the 3-6 June 1942 Battle of Midway. While it was not enough to end the war, the Battle of

Midway was a catastrophe for Japan. The United States then turned to the task of ejecting

the Japanese from the Solomon Islands to clear Allied shipping lanes. This was not easy.

Beginning in August 1942, the United States invaded Guadalcanal, a long, drawn out

invasion that lasted for the rest of the year and until February 1943.50

Meanwhile, Germany was focused on waging war with the Soviet Union. Hitler

ordered the invasion of Russia in 1941, and at first it seemed like the German invasion was

going well. The Germans were able to slice quickly and deeply into Russia, all the way to

50 Keegan, 271-278.

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Moscow, but ultimately the decision to invade the USSR would prove to have been a huge

mistake. Just as Napoleon had found, Russia was too big and its winters too harsh. The

Nazis failed to capture Moscow or Leningrad, and so in late summer of 1942 Hitler

focused his attentions on Stalingrad. While the Germans initially had success in capturing

their targets on the way to Stalingrad, the protracted siege of Stalingrad would last until

February 1943. The Russians may not have put up much resistance in the beginning, but

eventually they rallied for their country and put up a show of force against their German

invaders. While the Germans were able to hang on in Russia through 1942, the next year

was a different story. The Soviets, in the end, won and forced the Germans to retreat after a

loss of well over one million people.51

Back in the United States, there was still a great concern in the library community

that Nazi propaganda would infiltrate the minds of American readers. Though Japan had

attacked the United States first, the library journals were still more concerned with the

German threat that had been looming in the distance for over a decade. In the article

“Libraries in the Present Emergency,” a librarian wrote, “Books are the weapons with

which battles of ideas are fought and libraries are the arsenals in which those weapons are

housed.”52 Librarians across the nation were encouraged to guard against anything that

contained a whiff of Nazism. But in their diligence they could not be too overzealous.

Library Journal nor the A.L.A. Bulletin wanted a repeat of the 1933 book burnings on

American soil. Along with the warnings for librarians to guard collections against outside

influences, they were also told to be sure that their selection processes did not mimic Nazi

51 Ibid., 173-208, 220-237.

52 “In the Present Emergency,” The Library Journal 67, no. 6 (April 1942): 370, 363.

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practices. This was not an opportunity for libraries to do away with questionable or

potentially “unwholesome” books. Some librarians might not have appreciated the works

of Oscar Wilde, but the war and the battle against Nazism was no time to weed him from

the collection. Rather librarians were to embrace such books as examples of the values of

American democracy.

There was another way libraries were able to participate in the war effort beyond

their collections: the very building containing the collection could be of use. In many

American towns the library was one of the sturdiest buildings available, and so they were

recruited as potential air raid shelters, drawing on the experience of the British. Libraries

also had the potential to serve as makeshift schools if a school was bombed.53 Librarians

were also called upon to be morale builders. Benjamin Chubak, a librarian at the College

of the City of New York, put it bluntly when he told his fellow librarians that “it is the

most important duty of the librarian to have available all material which is known to affect

favorably the mental state of the people of this nation.”54 To help do that, librarians could

turn to the examples found in their professional journals, which not only called them to

action, but showed them how to do it. Libraries with active programs sent in their plans

and policies so that other libraries could create their own. The Library of Hawaii in

particular, having experienced the turmoil of Pearl Harbor more directly, offered a wide

array of examples of how to be a responsive wartime library. While being ever diligent in

their collection building and reader services departments, the library also increased their

53 “Air Raids and the Schools,” The Library Journal 67, no. 4 (March 1942): 256-258.

54 Benjamin Chubak, “The Librarian: Morale Builder,” The Library Journal 67, no. 7 (April 1942): 347-348.

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community outreach, extending their book car service to Red Cross stations and working

with Navy librarians to see that the local troops had all of their reading needs met.55

While librarians would not have forgotten the book burnings of 1933, Americans

outside the library world had also not forgotten. Nine years after the events of May 10,

1933, Stephen Vincent Bénet, an American poet, wrote a poignant radio play to

commemorate the anniversary. In it, he dramatized some of the well-known authors whose

works were cast into the fires on those ominous nights. Literary figures Schiller and Heine,

and Americans Mark Twain and Walt Whitman argue against a nameless Nazi and insist

on the importance of literature and the upholding of intellectual freedom.56

As mentioned before, the gardening issue was a yearly fixture every summer in

Library Journal. It was only natural, then, that the gardening issue would continue once

the Victory Garden became popular. Where once librarians were instructed on which

books to buy about growing lilies and tulips and roses, now the library profession was to

encourage women to till up their ornamental plants and replace them with edible plants.

Tomatoes, squash, potatoes, cucumbers, cabbage- in wartime there was no time for the

pretty, only the useful. The self-sufficient home was the patriotic home, and so the patriotic

library must aid the community in learning to cultivate their backyard farms.57

Throughout the war, both journals were quick to pick up any mention of books or

libraries by the president or other important officials. A.L.A. Bulletin ran one such letter

55 Lucile Wilkinson, “The Library of Hawaii in War Time,” The Library Journal 67, no. 9 (May 1942): 453-456.

56 Stephen Vincent Bénet, They Burned the Books. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942.

57 The Library Journal 67, no. 5 (March 1942).

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that had been sent by President Roosevelt to the American Booksellers Association on 6

May 1942. He wrote,

“I should have liked to be with you in person to extend my greetings and

talk to you, for I have been a reader and buyer and collector of books all my life. It

is ever more important that your work should go on now than it has ever been at

any other time in our history…We all know that books burn- yet we have the

greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never

die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put

thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the

world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In

this war, we know books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to

make them weapons for man’s freedom.”58

Such addresses further served to remind librarians of their roles in a war that was just as

much about ideologies as expanding territories.

1943- The Turning of the Tide

By 1943, the tide had turned in the war, and this turning was evident from the very

first editions of Library Journal and A.L.A. Bulletin published in January. The United

States was gaining ground in the Pacific, and Hitler was facing his most difficult challenge

in the form of Russia. Librarians started to consider what would happen after the war, and

even how war could have been prevented in the first place. A librarian from the Buffalo

Public Library lamented in the “Reader’s Open Forum” that the war had come

58 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Letter to American Booksellers Association,” A.L.A. Bulletin 36, no. 6 (June 1942): 401.

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unexpectedly for many Americans. And while he chastises the media as well, his main

criticism is for librarians. He insists that “the books stood on our shelves, the facts were at

our disposal, but our readers were not alert to those facts for they were not aware, or not

sufficiently aware, of those books…there was a lack of determined and purposeful

librarianship that would use the tools to advantage…that would try to awake the sleepers.”

He went on to warn librarians that they should not sleep on the job again, and they should

keep in mind that just because the war was, at the moment, in the United States’ favor, the

victory had not yet been won. He argued that librarians should continually keep the morale

of their patrons in mind, and that in the event of victory, they should push their patrons to

read books that remind them of the what could have been lost if the war was lost.59

Like the above article, much of the professional literature of 1943 was devoted to

questions and not the planning that was so heavily represented in 1942. The war measures

were in place, and the weakening of Germany and Japan eased the fears American

librarians had of invasion. While still a possibility, it was a rather distant one, and so their

minds turned to other matters such as what would happen in the postwar period. In one

article published in February, the author applauded librarians for all they had achieved

since Pearl Harbor, drawing from articles submitted by libraries across the nation.

Librarians had cooperated with Civilian Defense Councils; served as collection centers for

tin, rubber, and paper; collected over ten million Victory book for the troops; provided

meeting spaces for local first aid and defense classes; and continued throughout to serve

their patrons with the latest news on the war and with morale boosting reading to keep the

59 Felix Pollack, “Letter to Readers’ Open Forum, Books in Wartime,” Library Journal 68, No. 1 (January 1943): 3-4.

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country’s spirits up before the news from the war became more favorable. But the purpose

of the article was not to merely praise librarians. The author wanted to press upon

librarians to accept the “tremendous task of developing an intelligently-informed, public-

minded citizenry so as to influence our legislators” to not make the same mistakes after

this war as was made after the last. Education, the author argued, was the key to holding

the American interest in enforcing a peace treaty in the long run and avoiding another great

war.60

While most of 1942 had been internally focused on the war’s impact on American

libraries, by 1943 the journals began to carry more stories about foreign libraries again.

Reports were sent from Canada, which was struggling to accept the National Selective

Service. Canadian librarians were encouraged to help their patrons accept their duty by

guiding their reading selections to democratic texts, much in the same way as British and

American librarians were doing.61 Meanwhile British librarians reported that they were

struggling to make up for the lack of trained staff since men and women were being called

up to the army or the civil service. Libraries were forced to seek out retired and married

former librarians to fill the role of trained librarian until the rest of their staff could come

home from the war. British librarians also found themselves trying to fulfill even more

expanded roles, organizing book drives, participating with the military to staff military

libraries, and dealing with shifting populations on top of, in certain cities, damaged

buildings.62 By October, there was even a report from the director of the State Central

60 “Librarians and the Peace,” The Library Journal 68, no. 3 (February 1943): 124-125.

61 “Canadian Libraries and the War,” A.L.A. Bulletin 37, No. 1 (January 1943): 1.

62 “British Libraries in Wartime,” A.L.A. Bulletin 37, No. 1 (January 1943): 7-12.

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Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow. He wrote that in 1941, as the “Hitlerites” were

pressing down upon Moscow, the library offered an exhibition entitled “The Best

Representatives of American Literature” that proved most popular with the beleaguered

comrades.63

1944- The High Price of Victory

For the United States, 1944 began with the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy and

with the continued chase of the Japanese across the Pacific islands. Slowly but surely

Allied forces continued to gain ground and in May 1944 the plan was set to begin the

French liberation. On 5 June, the Allies captured Rome, the first Axis capital to fall. That

was overshadowed by the offensive strike taken the next day. On 6 June 1944, American

troops joined the British in storming the beaches of Normandy in the first offensive strike

of Operation Overlord. Their goal was to being the process of liberating mainland Europe

from the weakened Nazi regime. Once the beach was secure, troops took three weeks to

prepare for Operation Cobra, which advanced the Allied Forces deeper into Normandy.

The troops liberated Paris on 25 August 1944, and by 30 August the Germans had been

forced to retreat beyond the Seine. If the war had not already been turned in the Allies

favor by the German defeat in Russia, it certainly was by September 1944.64 On 2

September Allied troops arrived in Belgium and Brussels was liberated the next day.

Operation Market Garden began later in the month and started the turning of the German

63 M. Rudomino, “From a Russian Librarian,” A.L.A. Bulletin 37, no. 9 (October 1943): 302.64 Keegan, 369-395.

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flank, but hopes of an early end to the war faded as British troops failed to capture

Arnhem, leading to the failure of the operation.65 Allied troops continued to push east into

Germany, however, picking off cities one at a time. By the end of the year they were

engaged in the Battle of the Bulge, and things were looking favorable for the Allies.66

If American librarians had lost some of their concern for the possibility of

bombings or an invasion in 1943, that concern was completely gone from the literature in

1944. While the war still played a prominent role, and libraries were still conforming to

wartime service standards, a new normalcy had settled in and librarians were looking

towards the conclusion of the war. It perhaps took a little longer than expected, but victory

seemed assured. After the Potsdam conference the ALA met with government postwar

committees to discuss how libraries could contribute to demobilization and readjustment.

They, like the government committees, were concerned about the veterans returning home

and being reincorporated into society after the trauma of war. The government committees

suggested that American librarians could help in this process on the local level by helping

veterans find information about jobs and training programs and by pointing them in the

direction of books that might help with any post service mental or health problems they

might have faced.67 Just as the ALA had been pushing its librarians during the war to fully

embrace their potential within their communities, they were now pushing for librarians to

continue to be important figures in their neighbors’ lives.

65 Ibid., 437.

66 Ibid., 436-447.

67 Floyd W. Reeves and Carl Vitz, “Demobilization and Readjustment and the Library,” A.L.A. Bulletin 38, no. 2 (February 1944): 43-53.

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Still taking the opportunity to report on libraries in foreign lands, two reports stand

out above the rest as librarians from China and Russia detailed their wartime experiences.

In January 1944, the A.L.A. Bulletin ran a report from Ding U. Doo, the librarian of

China’s national university, Sun Yat-sen University in Kwangtung. He lamented that he

had not had more time at the beginning of the war to prepare his collection for removal- he

was prepared for air raids but not an invasion- and details his mad three day scramble to

pack up 50,000 of the library’s 210,000 books into 300 cases. He then transported the

cases over three thousand miles from Canton to Yunnan where the library continued to

serve the community how it could. Officials then ordered the library back to Kwangtung to

serve what students could not leave, and so back across the three thousand miles the three

hundred cases went. Since the main library building had been destroyed, Dr. Doo divided

his collection across 15 smaller libraries spread throughout the city. Able to pack up the

library and move with only a few hours notice, the library was thus able to continue to

serve patrons throughout the war.68 Once the Germans had retreated, news came from

librarians in Russia of the destruction they left behind them. Many cultural sites, including

Tchaikovsky’s home, had been purposefully targeted by German soldiers. Over one

million books were destroyed at Kiev University and another four million confiscated and

sent to Germany. Millions of other books were burned by the Nazis at libraries across the

country, and thousands more were transported to Germany. Librarians from Leningrad also

reported that even during the hardest months of the war, the Leningrad Library of the

Academy of Sciences remained open, and though the temperature in the building

sometimes reached 25 degrees below zero, they did not burn the books for fuel. As areas of

68 Ding U. Doo, “A Librarian in Wartime,” A.L.A. Bulletin 38, no. 1 (January 1944): 4-5.

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Russia were liberated, the Soviet government sent books to the areas to being to restore

some normalcy to the war torn people.69

1945- Looking to the Future

By early 1945, Allied troops were closing in on Germany from the west and the

east. The Battle of the Bulge ended with a decisive Allied victory in mid January, and on 4

March Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Yalta Conference to begin deciding their

postwar plans for Europe. By 19 April, Soviet troops had reached the suburbs of Berlin,

and a couple of days later launched the opening assaults in the Battle of Berlin. Hitler had

long since moved to his bunker, and his staff began to turn on him. He committed suicide

on 30 April, and on 2 May the city of Berlin was surrendered to the Soviets. At one minute

past midnight on 8 May, the ceasefire went into effect and Britain celebrated V-E Day.70

However, the war was not yet over in the Pacific theatre. The United States spent the first

part of the year fighting in Iwo Jima and the Philippines, continuing to grab land away

from the Japanese. At the 17 July Potsdam Conference, the Allies agreed to insist on an

unconditional surrender by the Japanese. To bring a swift conclusion to the war, on 6

August the United States launched the first nuclear attack in the history of the world,

dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, followed on 9 August with another bomb dropped

69 Ethel M. Tacke, “Soviet Libraries in the War,” The Library Journal 69, no. 11 (July 1944): 384-388.

70 Keegan, 516-533.

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on Nagasaki. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito broadcast the surrender of Japan, bringing

an end to the most deadly war in the history of the world.71

While the victory and end of the war was still several months away, the library

journals discuss the war as if it has all but concluded. All of their war related articles are

about building the peace and reporting on foreign libraries. In January 1945 librarians

began to question what would be done with all of the surplus books they had sent to the

front for soldiers to read, and plans were made for their distribution. Writers continued to

stress the need for librarians to be sensitive to the vocational and mental needs of returning

veterans.72 But the war had raised other issues as well. While Americans had sacrificed so

much in the fight against Hitler and had preached the value of democracy, many

Americans were beginning to question why some of their fellow Americans were not being

treated as equally as others. Beginning with a letter from the president of the Chicago

Public Library questioning why the ALA would continue to host conferences in hotels

where African American librarians were not welcomed, a conversation was started about

the position of the ALA and equal rights. Althea Warren, the retiring president of the ALA,

had suggested that it was time to return to holding annual conferences in Southern cities

since “the A.L.A. means nothing to the Negro librarian.” African American librarians

countered this, arguing that they had been members of the ALA for many years, and

without the annual conference they would not have access to the educational and career

building benefits that made them value their membership. Warren replied that it had not

been her intention to offend, but she and the committee for the conference had been unable

71 Ibid., 574-585.

72 The Library Journal 70, no. 1 (January 1945).

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to find a suitable hotel in the North or the South that would place no restrictions on African

American guests.73 The first rumblings of the Civil Rights movement had reached the

attention of the American Library Association.

As the war wound down in Europe and then in the Pacific, so too did war talk in the

professional journals. Just as the journals had ignored the war for as long as possible, they

excluded it as soon as victory was imminent. By April 1945, the only mention of the war in

the A.L.A. Bulletin came in one postwar building article. In May 1945 came the last

acknowledgement of the anniversary of the burning of the books in Germany in May 1933-

by 1946 the library world had moved on from such remembrances.74 While both journals

sporadically ran articles about the plight of the returning soldier throughout the summer,

by July 1945 the A.L.A. Bulletin had begun to return to its prewar format, running full page

articles for each of their new elected officers.75 As librarians and library staff returned from

the war and reentered civilian life, they earned their picture in Library Journal and the

A.L.A. Bulletin, but in some months those pictures were the only reminder that a war had

ever occurred. When the war was done, the professional journals were done with it too.

Concluding Thoughts

When one looks back at the A.L.A. Bulletin and Library Journal of the war years, a

definite pattern emerges. Slow to discuss the war while it began in Europe, an

acknowledgment was finally forced when reports started to filter in from war-ravaged

73 “A.L.A. and Equal Rights,” A.L.A. Bulletin 39, no. 1 (January 1945): 29-30.

74 “May 10: An Anniversary,” A.L.A. Bulletin 39, no. 5 (May 1945): 1.

75 “New A.L.A. Board Members,” A.L.A. Bulletin 39, no. 7 (July 1945): 2-10.

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libraries, particularly from Britain. Tales of thousands of lost books sparked the

imaginations of American librarians, and they were forced to being to ponder what would

happen if the war ever came to their shores. These ponderings were increased when the

United States began offering more and more aid to the Allies, but still up until the United

States officially declared war, the greatest concern to American librarians was the threat of

Nazi propaganda. After Pearl Harbor, however, the library journals completely changed

course and had no room for any articles that did not pertain to the war effort. At first

focusing on preparing for the physical realities of war in the event of an invasion, with

Allied victories the articles soon shifted to the psychological effects. By 1943 the journals

were so optimistic about the war’s outcome that they began to offer suggestions for the

postwar library. This postwar thinking only increased with more Allied victories, and by

the end of the war the journals had completely moved beyond the war and back into

civilian concerns.

While American librarians sympathized with their colleagues in other parts of the

world, they had only been jolted out of their isolationism by the direct attack of Pearl

Harbor, and when the war concluded they were only too happy to return to normal as soon

as possible. Given the national scale of the publications, it can be difficult to discern the

individual voices of the thousands of librarians across the nation, but one can safely

conclude that the hesitant librarians became staunch supporters of the war effort once the

war finally came to them. Their contributions to their communities cannot be

underestimated as they provided a focal point for preparation and morale boosting. The

professional journals themselves were crucial to this as they were able to enforce a certain

amount of uniformity across the nation with their suggested policies and plans. In the fight

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against Hitler and the Axis, understanding and valuing democracy became crucial, and

librarians were poised to provide the books to support it. As the soldiers returned home, the

libraries were able to transition back into civilian libraries, but even then the journals

reminded them that they had an important role in the postwar world. Veterans were a huge

concern for communities across the nation, and librarians were once again eager to help by

doing what librarians do best, in times of peace and war: providing information. American

librarians did not face the destruction that their European colleagues did, but they

nonetheless stepped up to the challenges of the home front and did their bit to help the

Allies and democracy win the war.

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Works Cited

Báez, Fernando. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. Translated by Alfred MacAdam. New York: Atlas, 2008.

Battles, Matthew. “Knowledge on Fire.” American Scholar 72, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 35-52.

Becker, Patti Clayton. Books and Libraries in American Society During World War II: Weapons in the War of Ideas. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Bénet, Stephen Vincent. The Burned the Books. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942.

Edsel, Robert M. and Bret Witter. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. New York: Center Street, 2009.

Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Knuth, Rebecca. Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.

Knuth, Rebecca. Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Mattern, Eleanor. “World War II Archivists: In the Field and on the Home Front,” Library & Archival Security 24, no. 2 (2011): 61-81.

Peiss, Kathy. “Cultural Policy in a Time of War: The American Response to Endangered Books in World War II.” Library Trends 55, No. 3 (Winter 2007): 370-386.

Polastron, Lucien X. Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History. Translated by Jon E. Graham. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007.

Spencer, Brett. “Preparing for an Air Attack: Libraries and the American Air Raid Defense During World War II.” Libraries & The Cultural Record 43, No. 2 (2008): 125-147.

Stubbings, Hilda Urén. Blitzkrieg and Books: British and European Libraries as Casualties of World War II. Bloomington, IN: Rubena Press, 1993.

Ward, Graham. True Religion. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

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