In Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves Opritsa Popa has documented what might justifiably be
described as the most celebrated case of looting of two German cultural treasures by a member
of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and their subsequent odyssey across both an ocean
and a continent: the pilfering from a cellar in Bad Wildungen of the ninth-century Liber
Sapientiae containing the two leaves of the oldest extant German heroic poem the Old High
German Hildebrandslied along with the fourteenth-century illuminated Willehalm codex both of
which had been removed from the State Library in Kassel for protection from bombing raids.
