Harvard Holocaust Books To Remain on Widener Shelves

For nearly five decades, Harvard's libraries have housed several hundred books looted from Holocaust victims and sent back to the United States by the victorious Allies, a government report revealed this Tuesday.

The report--issued by the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets--identified thousands of books and works of art that were shipped to libraries and museums throughout this country in the years after the Second World War and were never returned to their original owners.

But while the report suggested the U.S. might not have done all it could to return the items, University Library officials defended their possession of the books.

No one has ever sought the books, University officials said, and Harvard has not sought them out.

"If anyone ever came to us and said those are our books, we, in a heartbeat, would return them," said Beth Brainard, director of communications for the Harvard College Library.

'Cultural Treasures of European Jewry'

The books in question made their way to Harvard after the Second World War, when U.S. government forces collected artwork, books and other cultural items and searched for the original owners.

In 1949, they turned over the unclaimed works to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., an organization formed by dozens of Jewish groups including the American Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress. The group sought university libraries in the United States to house volumes for which they could find no owners.

The acquisition of the volumes by Harvard was greeted with little fanfare in 1950. In his annual report for that year, when Harvard's libraries added a total of 30,000 books to their shelves, University Librarian Keyes D. Metcalf mentioned the Holocaust volumes only in passing.

A bigger coup that year was the donation of a valuable collection of 3,000 Jewish books and manuscripts that were previously owned by a European book collector and had been purchased wholesale after the war by a graduate of the College. The donated collection allowed Metcalf to boast that "the College Library now has one of the outstanding Hebrew collections in the United States."

By comparison, the Holocaust books from Jewish Cultural Reconstruction hardly aroused much interest. In fact, the first time the organization offered some of the books to universities, Harvard library officials lost the paperwork and never replied.

A year later, the group's secretary wrote a second time--this time specifically to Harvard--asking incredulously if Harvard wanted to pass up this chance at enlarging their collection (The group's secretary was none other than famed philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt).

According to Sidney H. Verba '53, director of the University Library and Pforzheimer University professor, Harvard accepted the books almost as a favor to the organization.

"They then sent a letter to us asking if we could store the books....We accepted the books," Verba said.

But at the time, the books were in some demand. According to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction's correspondence with Harvard, the organization thought the books would be in demand and emphasized to potential recipient libraries that it could not guarantee that they would get the books they wanted.

In its form letter to Harvard, the group advertised itself as the "trustee and distributing agent of a considerable stock of books of Jewish content, which are under the control of the American authorities in Germany."

The process to acquire books was complicated. Libraries had to fill out detailed applications specifying--in triplicate--the size of their facilities, whether or not they owned a card catalog system, the number of books in their collections, their budget and their interest in Hebrew, Yiddish and German books.

Jewish Cultural Reconstruction sent Harvard librarians a 120-page typewritten list of thousands of books and librarians responded by checking off the books they wanted in red pencil.

By July 17, 1950, Harvard library officials had signed off on the conditions for acquiring the books. They could not sell the volumes. Shipping would cost 30 cents a volume. And, if the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction found any of the books' owners, the library would have to give them up.

Each volume would also have to be marked with a bookplate identifying the book as a gift of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.

The bookplate would ensure, according a letter from Arendt, that the "present and future readers may be reminded of those who once cherished them before they became victims of the great Jewish catastrophe."

The bookplates, she wrote, would allow future scholars to "retrace the history and the whereabouts of the great cultural treasures of European Jewry."

By July 1951, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction ended its distribution efforts. The last shipment of books arrived at Harvard in mid-August. The next year, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction was disbanded.

Today, the books in Harvard's collection are scattered throughout Widener Library. The only way to figure out which books came from Holocaust victims is by looking for the plates.

Staying in the Stacks

Harvard's possession of the books came under scrutiny when the Presidential Commission contacted University Library officials to ask how Harvard had acquired the volumes and whether Harvard still had the books they received 50 years ago.

Library officials responded by sending the commission an inventory of the titles in Harvard's collection. They said they had never heard from the commission again but that they would willingly return the books to their rightful owners--if they ever surfaced.

But no one has ever come along to claim the books. The texts, mostly from the 1700s and 1800s, are fairly commonplace and not unusually valuable, Verba said.

While the presidential report said many organizations are making arrangements to find the properties' rightful owner, Verba said Harvard will not take such steps.

He added that he sees no ethical questions with the University keeping the books, since he said they cannot easily be traced to their owners. He said the books would have been lost or destroyed long ago had they not come to libraries like Harvard's.

"I think there's...no relationship whatsoever to paintings, where they have a provenance and you could go back and search" for for the original owners, he said.

"I think it's great that [these books] came to these libraries because they're preserved and available to people," he added.

--Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.