By early 1946, however, the U.S. Army had embarked on an organized effort to repatriate some 3 million books that had been looted by the Nazis.
[1]The original collecting point in 1945 was the Rothschild Library in Frankfurt, but the overwhelming numbers required them to find a new location in the I. G. Farben building in Offenbach.
General Dwight Eisenhower issued an order in September 1945 that all trained librarians who were officers in the Western Theatre of Operations were to report to him for possible duty in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A).
At the close of the war, books intended for the Nazis infamous museum, the Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question, had been found in a large private house in Frankfurt.
As such, much of the Biblioteca Rosenthaliana,[4] 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 Depot.
The house contained a domed library with a 26 foot long desk of mahogany with bronze inlaid swastikas.
The library also contained a pornographic table supported by four large replicated penises, each inserted through a pair of female breasts.
Other items were added to these collections from the libraries of Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Constantin von Neurath, and a series of typed autobiographies of prominent Nazi leaders.
[10] About one million books that were still at the Offenbach Archival Depot in 1946 were never returned to the USSR because of a US decision not to repatriate unclaimed Jewish property, property of the Baltic republics (whose annexation by the Soviet Union was not recognized), or that of exile groups and institution like the Cossacks or Russian Orthodox Church...[11]After the war, many of the books hidden by the Germans were collected by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the American military government, and collected at the Offenbach Depot.
In its cabinets bolted with iron bars there were letters, pictures, Torah scrolls, embroidered ark curtains, brass and silver menorah, Passover plates, and precious books and manuscripts.
For Captain Isaac Bencowitz, a Rockefeller Institute chemistry professor, and director of the Central Collecting Point, and for his staff, the daily work of sorting, cataloging, and finding the owners of these objects was a poignant mission.
Between March of 1946 and April of 1949 the Offenbach Archival Depot succeeded in returning to survivors, descendents and museums over three million looted items.