Culture Carnage

Hitler's book burnings, and all that went before, were only a mild beginning. The destruction of books and libraries in World War II "probably exceeds by many times the destruction of all previous wars and catastrophes put together." So report Librarians Milton E. Lord and Kenneth R. Shaffer in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. Their findings:

EUR| Poland: an estimated 70% of all libraries destroyed or looted. f| Russia: 55 million volumes destroyed in the Ukraine alone.

<) Czechoslovakia: half the libraries and archives gutted. (In Prague a caravan of Nazi trucks carted off to Germany 700,-ooo volumes from the huge Charles University library.)

<| China: 91 out of 108 colleges occupied, bombed out or seriously damaged. C| England: some 30 great libraries severely hit. (The University of London alone lost far more than the 100,000 volumes destroyed in one of its main libraries.)

The Bulletin recalls the world's outrage at the 1914 burning of Belgium's famed Louvain University Library--which resulted in a special clause in the Versailles treaty to compel the Germans to restock it. Amid the culture carnage of World War II, the second destruction of Louvain (in 1940) was a mere incident. What the Nazis didn't burn, bomb or pilfer from Europe's libraries, they fed into pulping machines to make new paper. The library of the Yugoslav Ministry of War was sold to a junk dealer for 180,000 dinars (about $4,000).

"Library buildings can and will be replaced," say the authors, "... the archives that record the history of a city or a nation may never be." Sometimes the very efforts of scholars to save their archives were what destroyed them. Reports the Bulletin: "When the great library of the Chapter of St. Thomas [in France] was threatened, it was hurriedly evacuated for storage in a rural area. There the books were destroyed ... by rain, mold, rats, mice and insects." The library itself was never damaged.

The monks of the Abbey Van Berne in Holland hid their rarest volumes in local farmhouses; virtually all were destroyed. In Manila it was the same story.

Damage was done by both sides. "One of the most permanently devastating raids in the entire war," say Librarians Lord and Shaffer, was the R.A.F. attack of Dec. 3, 1943 which wiped out more than nine-tenths of Leipzig's famed publishing center. Not only books (most German publishers kept vast stocks there), but irreplaceable matrices, blocks and castings were lost in flames.

Conclusion: "The manuscript, the roll, the tablet [precursors of books] have often come through centuries. . . . The book and the library have been respected and safeguarded, even in war, as the very corporate mind of society. In 1939, society . . . turned upon itself and deliberately strove to destroy . . . that mind. It succeeded in a large measure."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.