List of libraries damaged during World War II

Concerning the confiscation of library books, one military order stated: "The Army groups and their designees may demand information from any person concerning economic data, supplies, consumption, storage, purchase and sale of goods, products and wares of every kind.

A decree of the autumn of 1942 ordered all university libraries to hand over all early printed Czech works and first editions to the Germans.

The Germans withdrew the Czech classics, as well as the works of the 15th century reformer John Hus, of Alois Jirásek, the author of historical novels, the poet Victor Dyck, Karel Čapek, Vladislav Vančura and others.

It can be seen as gruesome precedence allowing communist regime, along with Soviet occupants post 1948 - 1968 respectively, to withhold parts of the seminal cultural heritage for generations.

"[41] Russian soldiers confiscated books looted by the Germans, "...notably including those of the great Hungarian Jewish collectors..." and sent many of them back to Moscow, rather than leaving them in Hungary.

After the war, many of the major collections looted from Italy were identified by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives service of the American military government and returned to their owners.

The Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the Deutsche Historische Bibliothek Rom were all returned, although not all were intact, to their owners in Italy.

Figures are hard to come by, but by the end of the war, bombing had accounted either directly or indirectly for the destruction of 50 percent of the total book resources in Japanese libraries.

This was complicated by the passage of time and the loss of some records and the concealment of others by the NKVD and its successor agencies of the Soviet secret police.

Consider the case of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which in 1918 had regained their independence after centuries of Russian occupation?

As a result of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1940, they were once more occupied by Russian troops and in 1940 bookstores and libraries were 'cleansed' and unwelcome titles were burned.

These succeeding regimes brought not only an appalling waste of human lives, but also rapidly alternating prohibitions of books, purging of libraries and the rewriting of history and textbooks.

Materials were brought in from the private collections from Kovno, Shavle, Mariapol, Volozhn and other towns, and included books from over 300 synagogues and personal libraries.

One incident involved an assistant of Dr. Pohl dumping out five cases of rare books in order to make room for an illegal shipment of hogs.

Workers were forced to select the most valuable objects from the collections of YIVO and other local Jewish institutions to be sent to Frankfurt, while the remaining items would be destroyed... A group that was dubbed the "paper brigade" led by Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, risked their lives daily by hiding material in the building's attic or smuggling it into the Vilna ghetto, where they buried it or gave it to non-Jewish contacts for safekeeping.

Some of the hiding places went undiscovered and the items stored there survived the war, but the YIVO headquarters and its contents were completely destroyed.

[62] "He [Captain Seymour Pomrenze] was instrumental in the restitution of thousands of looted archives, including those of the Strashun Library in Vilna, Lithuania.

The contents of the library, along with those of the YIVO building in Vilna, were looted for eventual placement in the anti-Semitic "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question."

Pomrenze oversaw the return of tens of thousands of items from the Strashun Library to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research headquarters in New York.

The librarian of the IKG wrote lists of the books, but none of the documents mention their numbers and the YIVO in New York was not very cooperative regarding the research.

"[65] "...the Japanese looted very thoroughly the head office at Batu Gajah: they removed all the scientific equipment and took away or broke about 5,000 rock slices.

Fortunately the rock and mineral collections and the library and records did not fare so badly: eventually they tried to burn down the building, but this was prevented by the Asiatic staff.

A serious loss was the disappearance of a memoir and map ready for publication, as well as all the relevant notes, so a good deal of the country will have to be re-mapped.

The high point was of course the famous library of about 160,000 volumes of the International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam, which was confiscated within two months of the invasion.

The International Archives of the Women's Movement, established in Amsterdam in 1935, lost its whole collection after the institute was closed by the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) in June 1940.

"[74] "In Holland [sic] the monks of the Abbey van Berne distributed the early printed books on the monastic library among neighboring farmhouses.

As such, much of the Biblioteca Rosenthaliana, the library of the Jewish Portuguese Seminarium of Amsterdam, the books of the Societas Spinozana, the collections of the Freemasonic Groot Orde der Nederlanden, the volumes of the Etz Chaim Seminarium, and twenty Sifre Toroth (plural of Torah) were returned to their country from the Offenbach Archival Depot.

Poland faced especially great loses, as the Germans continuously bombed Warsaw during the early stage of the war and focused at the beginning of occupation on "outright destruction of Jewish books and religious artifacts".

[79] What little did survive during the initial bombing and shelling was looted during the occupation and transported to Berlin, so the German's could study the "Jewish Question" (in the case of Jewish collections)[79][80] or other subjects, such as the Polish military doctrine in the case of the Central Military Library, whose bulk of collection was seized and transported to Germany immediately following the conquest of Warsaw.

In the first investigative statement given to the officers of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia in mid-May 1945 in Kupinec near Zagreb, German General Alexander Löhr said that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the complete destruction of Belgrade.