A chilling reminder of Hitler s twisted power. BBCFor readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare
with Amber Eyes the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries and the
small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful
owners. While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books they
were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new
research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves Anders Rydell tells the
untold story of Nazi book theft as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books.
When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe s libraries and bookshops large and small the books
they stole were not burned. Instead the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that
they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war the
libraries of Jews Communists Liberal politicians LGBT activists Catholics Freemasons and
many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research and used as an intellectual
weapon against their owners. But when the war was over most of the books were never returned.
Instead many found their way into the public library system where they remain to this day. Now
Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes setting out to return it to
its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun
the monumental task of combing through Berlin s public libraries to identify the looted books
and reunite them with the families of their original owners. For those who lost relatives in
the Holocaust these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have
ever held. And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given he shows just how much a
single book can mean to those who own it.
