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Friedman
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that the captured Jewish book treasures might serve a useful pur
pose for founding specialized research libraries on the Jewish ques
tion. Upon the seizure of Sudetenland in the autumn of 1938,
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi top theoretician, requested the Reich
Commissioner for the Sudeten area, Konrad Henlein, to confis
cate all Jewish religious and secular literature. Henlein promptly
delegated this undertaking to one of his aides, Dr. Suchy. In No
vember, 1938, the Chief of the Security Policy, Reinhard Heydrich
accompanied his directives for the Cristall Night pogroms with
this injunction: “The archives of the Jewish communities are to be
confiscated by the police, so that they will not be destroyed [in the
planned anti-Jewish riots]. . . . Important in this respect is the his
torically valuable material.” The following dispatch sent on No
vember 15,1938, by local SS and police leaders from Graz, Austria,
reveals how Heydrich’s orders were observed: “By order of the
Special Police the valuable library of the Rabbi [D. Herzog] was
placed under the seal of the Gestapo during the night ofNovember
10th, [also] . . . large portions of the archives and the library [of the
Synagogue] were removed by the Special Police from the burning
office building to safe custody.”The same line of action is indicat
ed in a letter written by a high SS officer in Munich on March 18,
1939: “The Special Police . . . is designated as the official agency
for the processing of the Jewish archives [and books] taken into
custody during the
Judenaktion.
Alfred Rosenberg, whom Hider had charged with the Nazi in
doctrination of the German people, was given the additional as
signment of waging the “ideological and spiritual war against Jews
and Judaism.”This program included, among other things, the es
tablishment of a
Hohe Schule
(Advanced Training Institute) of the
NSDAP in Frankfurt to study the “ideological enemies of Na
zism,” particularly the Jews. On January 29, 1940, Hider autho
rized Rosenberg to continue the preparations, already under way,
for setting up the
Hohe Schule
, and to procure for its library all nec
essary items from Jewish libraries and collections. Rosenberg was
also authorized to set up an adequate staff for the acquisition of
Jewish property. Thus the infamous
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosen