documents. their work has left its own archival trail that scholars can file desk can follow. -- can follow. researchers today pursue their missions and research rooms at on light relying on the skills of archives and a library professionals and i am proud of our staff at the national tohives and the work they do assist the modern information hunters. is a professor of american history at the university of pennsylvania where she teaches courses on modern sexuality, women and gender. she is the author of people amusements, working women at leisure at any turn of the century new york, zoot suit, in a manic character and extreme style, and hope in a dark, the up america's beauty culture, a finalist for the los angeles times book award, and named one of amazon's 1999 top 100 books in women's studies. she is a fellow of the society of american historians and serves on the the executive board. a consultantd as to museums, archives, and public history projects. please welcome kathy peiss. [applause] prof. peiss: thank you. it is a pleasure to be here and i need to give a strong note of thanks to the national archives not only for inviting me but for archivistsions and aired i could not have written this book without the national archives, so i am deeply grateful. stories of world war ii, of combat, courage, death, and destruction. the complex decision-making behind military decisions and foreign relations and the reshaping of global geopolitics after the war. have come tors, we appreciate the unusual alliance between the cultural world and battlefield during world war ii. especially the american curators and museum specialists who saved art and culture in wartime europe, the monuments, a unit of the american military. there are still many hidden stories on the margins of battlefields that shed light on the war and its impact on american life. this is one of those stories. it was revealed to me unexpectedly when i stumbled upon a memorial to my father's in 1952rother, who died at 40. either in for the first time about his surprising life about 16 years ago. he was the eldest son in a jewish immigrant family, receive scholarships from trinity college and harvard to study philosophy. he taught in a wpa funded community college in the midst of the great depression and earned a library degree. he was a librarian at harvard at the outset of the war when he was recruited into the office of strategic services, the wartime intelligence agency, to acquire enemy publications abroad. he had ad of the war, mission at the library of congress to obtain all works published in germany and occupied countries for american libraries. i spent many hours tracing his life and work not thinking that a book would result from it. the process of uncovering his story was a remarkable one for me. i never met him, he died before i was born. his light became an integral part of mine. his story led me to the information hunters. a band of librarians, scholars, spies, and soldiers whose more effort centered on books and documents. they gathered enemy publications in stockholm at lisbon, search for records and liberated paris, the rubble of berlin. they seized nazi works and bookstores and schools and millions of books hidden in german and mines and caves and mineshaft. improvising the techniques of librarians and wartime conditions, they contributed to allied intelligence, safeguarded endangered collections, and restitutive looted books. and they build up the international holdings of american libraries. came men and a few women together in a series of mass collecting efforts that originated in the unique conditions of world war ii and they offer a contrast or complement to the monuments men, the army unit that grew out of a presidential commission dedicated to the cultural protection of heritage in war zones. books are less straightforward than our treasures and many different decision-makers and personnel address the problems they posed and their potential to aid the war effort. a word about books. it is worth recalling books serve readers in many ways. information,ces of forms of communication, material or physical objects, and a record of cultural heritage. in a total bore, these attributes became terrains of battle. more than in any previous war, world war ii required mobilization of knowledge to fight the enemy. the war's ideological confrontations contrasted freedom at fascism, which were played out in the realm of books, propaganda, and media. the destruction of culture to armed conflict and the third reich's policies drew new -- attention to preserving civilization in a time of war. each of these elements brought together on american librarians and scholars, soldiers and spies, during the war and postwar period. the story begins with intelligence. the u.s. government had a limited capacity for foreign intelligence gathering on the eve of the war. ramped up its compilation of dossiers on domestic threats, intercepted male, american embassies reported on foreign developments, the armed services began to ramp up military intelligence. the u.s. was behind france and intelligence gathering at as the international crisis mounted, president roosevelt came to believe that the government needed a more robust intelligence capability. appointed a decorated world war i veteran, boyer, and political operative to build a civilian intelligence agency known as the office of strategic services. calledly, the agency was the coordinator of information and i would underscore that name. towas this new attention information that led to these missions. the first focused on the task of gathering and analyzing non-secret publications and documents and to do this, donna been unlisted at the help of archibald macleish, an unlikely pair who spent a lot of time together. the famed poet, playwright, and librarian of congress. the library of congress had become a site of a new cultural alliance. andas an interventionist race to stakes for librarians. he called on them to not only be custodians of culture, but defenders of freedom. 1940, in such a time as hours when wars are made against the works, the keeping of these records is a kind of warfare, the keepers, whether they wish are not, cannot be neutral. strangely, the origins of america's intelligence apparatus might be traced to the meetings of these men in the summer of 1941. we tend to think of intelligence in terms of the exploits of spies, secret operations, decoded messages. but publicly available information, open sources were always important and remain important. donovan at mcleish believed that intelligence could be cleaned from the close analysis of open sources, using the methods and tools of scholarship, which might reveal information useful for the war effort. for a newspaper -- foreign newspapers, industrial directories and the like were in great demand. the international book trade was shot down by the war, so other means of acquisition had to be found. not long after the attack on pearl harbor, they formed an agency that has an unwieldy name. the international -- interdepartmental committee for the acquisition of the foreign publications, known as the idc. it was chaired by william langer, a harvard historian, and head of the research and analysis branch. whoas run by a 28-year-old was recruited from harvard library. recruited myrn uncle ruben into the oss. wasas 90 when i met him, he still very sharp and had the habits of an intelligence agent, he had a selective hearing loss when there was a question he did not want to answer. the acquisitions committee got off to a slow start, failed to acquire a single item in four months. they began to send librarians and scholars are brought to collect material. they thought they could get away but the or two people, into lisbon,ded stockholm, london, cairo, -- i will talk about the stockholm and lisbon operations. the stockholm operation was headed by the only woman to serve as a field agent in this project, adele geithner. she had an unusual background, she grew up in hollywood. but she had a scholarly bent and went to the university of medievalor a phd in linguistics, which she earned in 1930. like many women of her era, she was denied an academic career. she carried on her own research while employed by senior faculty and copyo to go abroad or photograph rare books and manuscripts for their scholarship. in 1934,tican library she began to observe scholars filming their research using small cameras. she trained herself to do the same. she was in germany when the war broke out. she participated in an air raid drill. she left paris just ahead of the german invasion, made her way to lisbon, then returned to the united states in 1941. 18 months later, she returned to europe, this time to stockholm, to film enemy publications for the oss. she worked closely with british intelligence, but also developed her own channels of access through booksellers, sympathetic librarians, government agencies. she also engaged in covert acquisitions. she made contact with the danish resistance at clandestine breast. she worked with the british to smuggle periodicals into sweden from germany. there are also family stories that she was engaged in espionage along the coast of france. i have not been able to prove this in the national archives records. her personal record -- personnel record contains only a single sheet of paper. somebody rated it at some point -- raided it at some point. she was the most secretive of the agents. frustrating her bosses, who thought she might be over around by the job. she was the most effective agent in the oss acquisitions program, gathering sources and relating them to london. the other part operation was in lisbon, where despite the dictatorship of salazar, book dealers at a new stance at a in otheriness periodicals from all other europe. lisbon was a magnet for intelligence agents from all of the countries. these included some american librarians, including ruben , emmanuel sanchez, who was sent by the library of congress. sanchez arrived first and after shaking off some portuguese undercover agents who were tailing him, he bound up being successful purchasing works on the open market and gathering secret materials. figure at thear library of congress and he wrote these wonderful letters, calling si, ada sanchez portrayed himself as a character in a spy novel. his closest contacts were the library inhe portugal, who were ally sympathizers who went with him to spain, where they approached german bookstores and acquired works that would have been too dangerous for the americans to collect on their own. the oss agents competed with sanchez to collect their work and they made the abounds at bookstores, took trips into the hinterlands, that photograph on the top left, and cultivated sympathetic locals to loan secret items. oss was given an allotment of 160 five pounds a month for air shipments. , ach was a limited amount limited weight. most of the material they are acquired, camera equipment was in an out-of-the-way room and it was going on it day or night. i put on the slide this card that says h gregory thomas to show you the kind of remarkable sources you can find in the national archives. this is a calling card, like a business card, very small. it was the card of the head of the oss in the peninsula, togory thomas, which he sent , to thewith ruben peiss spymaster in switzerland. this was deep in a file in the field station records. the result was a massive and overwhelming quantity of material. by the end of 1942, their first year, over one billion pages had been duplicated and distributed to american government agencies and the numbers continue to grow. of an operation, 3000 meals of microfilmed periodicals. it is difficult to gauge the intelligence value of these acquisitions. the committee claim -- they were very valuable because they were appealing to the bureau to increase their budget. the operational uses of this material seem limited, certainly compared to signals intelligence or code breaking. nevertheless, newspapers, scientific records, technical records from occupied countries could be mine for useful information. they could indicate enemy troop strength. they gave suggestions of new weaponry. levels of industrial production, transportation, and there are ways to estimate enemy deaths by extrapolating from obituaries. the kind of skills and scholarship being applied to these materials. many wartime officials perceived open sources to be highly important and invested considerable energy analyzing them. useful,these sources techniques of information management had to be employee to transform the physical object -- in this case microfilmed -- into the genre of intelligence. they extracted useful information, indexed it, provided abstracts, and translated 4% of all materials 42y are acquired into one of -- from 42 languages. this was quite an operation. disaggregated content, not the publications themselves, where the intelligence product. and a time before computers were not available, the oss hired a small army of indexers and translators, most women, to carry this on. into neutralon cities became less important after d-day for obvious reasons. informationt, hunters became integrated into military operations. if they were assigned to documents gathering teams called forcess, added these followed behind the army -- allies army as they advanced, scouring targets for operational or strategic information. they were army uniforms and operated under military command. select as specialists to archival records and publications often on-the-fly, instantaneous decisions. forough an unlikely role scholars, many took to this work. one of them was private max robe. journalist,man-born emigrated to the united states and became a bookseller in new york city before joining the army and being assigned to the oss. he had the idea of interrogating german prisoners of war in great britain who had worked in libraries and the book trade. his aim was to discover the whereabouts of important collections and he turned up incredible information that was ultimately of value to military intelligence as well as generally to people concerned about the fate of books. another agent was an avant-garde composer and music professor at smith college, who you see on the right. volunteered to do oss acquisitions work. he arrived after the liberation of paris, went from targeted to target, identified on a long list, some of which he created. as he wrote his wife, my work involves different methods of acquiring foreign publications than i or anyone in massachusetts would use. he learned how to interrogate informants and follow suspicious people. he said, i am good at stepping down an aisle and tracing things. offound massive quantities printed materials, which he confiscated. i requisitioned a two and a half ton truck today, i need a convoy actually. on thanksgiving 1944, he made his biggest discovery, a catch of patent abstracts, which were sent back to the u.s. the t4's look for material with immediate intelligence value, research related to weaponry and other war-related materials. there was a degree of mission creep, as there often is. in the final status of war, they seized all manner of works that might later be exploited for some purpose. lobe said, there were so many tempting targets, that even after a successful day, he felt uneasy because there is so much undone. hesees 1000 book that day -- seized 1000 books that day. although they were ordered to respect the integrity of libraries, they considered collections in the service of nazi is him to be fair game -- nazism to be fair game. there is a race studies posed in a library, that they removed, but not the library's other collections. they took endangered booked as well. weone officer explained, felt no qualms about going into bubble which used to be bookstores and removing any items of value because they would have been destroyed. there is also this sense of having a freedom to act prior to the establishment of order in these newly taken communities before the civil affairs officers came in. that, they called the. of the snatch, -- the period of the snatch. where anything goes. it was another story when ala terry government was in place. when officer into a bookstore at the germans were looking at him and he felt too uncomfortable seizing this stuff, so he paid cash for the lodge. as the investigators dug more deeply, they found vast quantities of books and publications stashed in surprising places in the wake of bombing raids, jim and i thought his library connections -- german authorities had hidden library collections. gold, artwork, and costumes of the opera had been stored, also the statert of library, piled in disarray where 2 million volumes of books and journals and other materials, added there was no catalog there. tragically, a fire had burned for several months in the mind, mine.y -- the the books were in the process of destruction. this was one of 25 places where the library had been stored. as the monuments men began surveying these areas, they were faced with hundreds of locations which contained not only works of art, but libraries and archives. late in the history groundwork for the treatment of books during the period of allied occupation, mass collecting missions may have ceased or a narrow in scope when the war ended in 1945. yet the opposite occurred. a convergence of needs at interest from the american library world, civilian government, antimilitary letter to the expansion of librarians involvement of god. the allied victory spurred which they required international holdings. the library of congress, top university libraries had committed themselves to a vision of american dominance through a cooperative program called the farmington plan, which would every book inng the world. the unitedperation, states would amass a global collection. the successor at the library of congress argued that in these holdings were a matter of national security. at the same time, american libraries competed with each other. this was not a genteel world that you might imagine when you think about libraries. now that the war was over, librarians schemed to get back into europe. the one that was especially successful was the hoover institution, which had been founded by herbert hoover after world war i, which sent a network of agents are brought collect records of war. here are two journalists that were doing journalism, but also engaged in collecting records for hoover. increasing the group concerned about librarians running around former battlefield and devastated cities, scooping up books. out of this situation, the library of congress propose in the summer of 1945 to establish a mission to acquire books for themselves and our research libraries. this mission was initially seen as a book purchasing operation. it would feel -- fail the failme gaps by buying -- -- fill the wartime gaps. this drew upon the expertise of the oss acquisition of publication. peiss was sent to head to the 1945. a group of librarians tournament 1946. here is a picture of a librarians in trench coats in front of the headquarters of the military government. middle, the man in the and a gentleman on the right is harry ladenburg, former head of .he new york public library at the time, he was 70 when he made this trip. one goal of the mission was to go to the prewar center of the german book trade to pick up a quarter of a million dollars worth of books that had been ordered by american libraries before the war. these had been successfully held in safekeeping, despite bombing damage. now the americans faced a different problem, to get them. it had become part of the soviet zone of occupation. a long negotiation took place between the american librarians at their soviet counterparts for their release. it was successful despite the increased tensions between dr. peiss: what became something of a legend, ruben paes and jacob zuckerman who is later the head of unesco's library division, led a check convoy of throughhrough leipzig soviet checkpoints. they were held by an audubon girl at the side of the road to get them to stop. but they arrived at the city where they were treated like celebrities. the people hoped their presence was a sign of an imminent u.s. takeover, which of course it was not. they dined and conversed with their russian counterparts, increasingly friends, while the trucks were loaded, and returned the next day to berlin with the goods. however, what was initially defined narrowly evolved into something else. the library of congress representatives operated under the auspices of the u.s. occupation government in germany, which authorized them to go into research institutes and libraries where they examined and at times confiscated materials. they screened and evaluated the vast quantities of publications that had already been seized by millions of pieces of material that needed to be screened. those not needed by the military or intelligence were given to the library of congress michigan -- mission. the librarians were also drawn to documents and ephemera, even though this was not really their chart. this was the debtor does of the collection -- this was the ultimatelywhich was sent to the library of congress. this became a massive scale program of acquisitions. a crucial dimension of allied occupation policy, the do not vocation of germany -- de-nazification of germany. except not the content were seized, german bookstores were closed. objectionable works were put under lock and key. this was true of schools, bookstores, publishing houses and many libraries. there were rates called operation tally-ho to remove nazi content from these places. this actually turned out to be a vast undertaking because the book trade was very large in germany. everything from academic treatises and school textbooks and popular fiction. over time, strict policies were enacted, accommodating in an allied agreement known as order number four, to not only seize, but destroy, all literature and material of a nazi nature including works that promoted fascism, nilla tourism, nationalism, anti-semitism, racism, and civil disorder. directive hithis the american press, many americans were outraged. during the war as you can see from this poster, governed there were government statements condemning nazi book burnings. that books cannot be killed by fire and words are weapons in the war of ideas. so this seemed a betrayal of a democratic values and the reason americans fought the war. to counter this negative publicity, the library of congress mission proposed screening and preserving up to 150 copies of each objectionable work for future research and is a record of nazi sm, with the rest sent to paper mills for pumping and producing much-needed stock. the military government officials were very upset at headlines like this one. orders nazi books burned. they said no, we are pulping them, not burning them. the execution of this policy was uneven. do not know exactly how many books were destroyed. about 2 million of them made their way to american university libraries as well as the library of congress. these are a small sample of such books in my own library at the university of pennsylvania. these were popular fiction books for the german troops. field post books, they were called. refer torians at penn them as a junk, as did most librarians, but they saved them. among the wartime missions involving books, the one that remains most meaningful to us today concerns the restitution of books that have been looted from jewish individuals and institutions. millions of these had been seized by nazi looting teams, including those directed by alfred rosenberg, to create an institute for research into the jewish question, essentially preserving these works for study even as the regime killed millions of jews in the holocaust. 1945, american troops discovered approximately 2 million of the looted volumes in . twol village, hungen months later, jewish-american officer looked up rosenberg's institute in an old frankfurt telephone directory and went to with a colleague to the site. the building had been destroyed. but they found scraps of paper with heber writing on the ground -- hebrew writing on the ground which led them to these books and a seller filled with books. the photo on the left is a photograph of one of those cellars. how to reserve and rescue these books was an unanticipated problem assigned to them ottomans men. some of the books were easily identified and could be -- assigned to the monuments men. some could be easily identified and were returned to their owner. the issue of restitution was that it was to the country and not the individual. however, many billions were unidentifiable, their owners were dead, their whereabouts were unknown. initially they were stored in this library, the rothschild , arary, collecting point relatively small place, about 2 million were crossed into this space. the monuments men were so overwhelmed with the amount of work to do that they gave the task of handling them to an ,merican civilian, glen goodman whose story i was fortunate to learn in an unpublished memoir. goodman had been a student and teacher in germany. he married there and did not leave when the u.s. went to her. he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. at the end of the war when he was released, he began to look for work and find a way to return home with his wife and family. he found his way to an office of monuments men julius buckman and frankfurt. there, buckman handed him three old volumes. and he said, can you identify these? goodman new two of them and left the third heard that was good enough for buckman who told him to report to the rothschild library and begin to organize these books for restitution. it was a really a most impossible job. finally, after many months of uncertainty, to military officers, both jewish-american, or put in charge. the first was seymour pomerantz, a professional archivist who worked at the national archives before the war and continued in government service long after. make a wet, a chemist bankewitzran -- isaac offenbachook over the archival depot. decent minister's found ways to shelter, repair and identify these looted books. they developed a large-scale book processing plant, designing workflows to make it possible to identify and restitution rapidly. despite the fact that the books were often damaged and in many different languages, most of which the german workers there could not read. came up the idea photographing the bookplates and havingin the books. and the workers memorize a small number of them. when they saw a book with that stamp, they put it into a box with the number, as you can see their number on the site. this sped up the identification process tremendously. in over two years, they returned over 3 million books. even so, there were three hunter six 2000 that were still -- 36 0,000 that were still orphaned and needed to be dealt with. ultimately the books were given to the control of a u.s.-based international organization called jewish cultural reconstruction. the group consisted of many jewish scholars, lawyers, and religious leaders. its executive secretary was honda aren't -- hannah arendt. they disturbed a books to the united states, israel and south america and western europe. so much what i described today involves improvised decisions made quickly on the ground, in situations of destruction, danger and uncertainty. at in which many other considerations, with good reason, had priority. protecting troops, feet feeding undefeated -- protecting troops. feeding a defeated population. and refugees. there were ethical questions raised by the librarians that came to be asked in the wake of this activity. i can talk more about that if you have questions about how to three through -- how to think through the ethics of acquisition and restitution in this time. want to of conclusion i point to several important legacies. war spurred new ways of thinking about fundamental aspects of professional elaborate work. such as rep reduction using microfilm, access, and retrieval of printed materials -- such as reproduction. this wartime program strongly shaped information signs after the war. realizedonly be through computerization. many of the ideas and practices began in this time. -- time period. a number of key figures and information signs were closely involved in oss including eugene power who founded university microfilms, now the information giant proquest. and frederick kilgore, who ofnded oclc, the forerunner world cap, the world's largest below graphic -- world cat, the world's largest below graphic database. it also contributed to the ambitions of american research library and gave universities extensive international holdings for the first time. these were often seen as serving the national interest and necessary for the pursuit of american foreign policy and global influence. at the same time, the work turned some librarians in other directions. including a renewed sense of internationalism. many working for unesco, for example. and let others to reflect upon the larger political purposes of their work. issues raised starkly by order number four. and strengthen their commitment to civil liberties and the library bill of rights. finally, the restitution of looted books was a milestone in the evolution of international efforts to protect cultural heritage and to claim it as an aspect of human rights. at the outset of the war, no one could have foreseen a large-scale government had led operation to acquire, exploit, rescue and restitution books. it turned out the libraries and scholars skills, expertise and aspirations aligned closely with american military and political objectives. they felt acutely their duty to win the war, the revulsion at the nazi regime, they're committed to document in the past and present for the future. and they believed that only america could rescue endangered civilization. as librarians and bibliophiles, they were stirred by the books and documents that they found. their mission wasn't bound up with the entire complex of american wartime values and postwar aims. mixing interest mental -- instrumental, political and strategic concerns with a sense of response ability to preserve the material records of knowledge and culture in the wake of so much destruction. thank you. [applause] dr. peiss: we have some time for questions and answers so if you there arestion, microphones on either side. this is being filmed by c-span. >> thank you for your talk. it sounds as if the librarians were turned loose on europe with carte blanche, whatever expertise they carried with them for which books they wished to take. i do not have the sense there was a shopping list. was there shopping list? second they, what was the military role in trying to shape apart from the monuments men and apart from restitution? dr. peiss: great question. initially, they had the habits of librarians. so what librarians do is they have what they call a want to list, list of books they want. go out and go to a bookseller or dealer and secure them. so, the oss was sending want lists to the agents in stockholm , lisbon, around the world. these were important materials that had been asked for. the problem, course, was the time lag. between getting-receiving the want list and how much time it would take to find the material, and then ship it-microfilm and ship it back. this was not what the most effective way to proceed. in many cases, they just, whatever they found, they just microphones it. they do not particularly -- they just microfilmed it. they did not particular the put in any order. so when it came to wartime agencies, it was dickel to use. this is why the oss created indexes to these records. did have some sense of what they wanted. but events out ran their capacity to find them. with respect to the library in theing after the war, sense of carte blanche, they were told, if the book was published in germany or in an occupied country, after 1939, acquire it. bit day got pushed back a to 1933, to include the nazi regime and it some cases back further, to include the rise of nazism. when i say there is mission creep here, that is what is happening to an extent. everybody in not the military was on board with this. they did not want librarians hanging around. [laughter] even the librarians in trench coats who are pretty well behaved. some people thought this is not for you. this is really something the military should be doing. but, because there was an effort to return troops home, to speed up the return of troops back home, they really had staffing problems. and the enormity of the material collected was such that they welcomed the library of congress mission in particular. more or less, not all of them followed the rules, but most of them did. a two questions. first, was there any coordination with the people preparing for the trials? and i was fascinated by the part of your talk about the new techniques of library science that developed as part of this. i wonder if preservation was part of this at all, or if this was just a turn toward micro-filming and forgetting about the original. shocking to see these materials sitting in faultlines. offenbach also. this death must've been in terrible shape. where there any preservation stuffques used -- this must have been in terrible shape. were there any presentation -- preservation techniques used? forces intohat t the fall of 1945, which included brass toe max loeb, look for material that could be used for the tribunals. they did find a number of materials that were then used. notas not a primary-it was something he dedicated to that purpose. but they were asked to be on the lookout, essentially, for material that could be used. so yes, absolutely. and films too. not simply text materials but films as well. the library techniques, i think preservation-microfilming was seen as a method of preservation. as well as reproduction. i think that probably there are a number of newspapers and -that onlys that are exist on microphone that is inaccessible and probably unreadable at this moment in time because it has not been preserved. but they had the sense that we need to do everything we can to preserve this history. and yes, it was very important to them to find ways to do that. the rothschild library, glen goodman sent many of the books or otherworms in them kinds of animal infestations, he sent them to the frank for it city hospital for fumigation. they found ways to dry the books. they were very attentive to conservation issues. kind of primitive because they did not have a lot of materials but they were attentive to it. rep. jeffries: the overall importance -- >> the overall imprints of his thaton is clear but >> were you able to tie any particular acquisitions in the war to a strategic battlefield moment, or something like that? dr. peiss: unfortunately, no. frederick kilgore claimed that among the idc, that there was material related to the atomic bomb that was useful to american physicists. i do not know that i can confirm that. that was his claim. he made it natalie to me personally at age 90, but also in his budget report -- he made it, not only to me personally at age 90, but in his budget reports, the rockets and weaponry, that information was useful. but i cannot really tie it. i think there is a gap between what they were hoping this material would show and its actual usability in the mist of battle. >> thank you. -- in the midst of battle. >> first i want to think you for your talk. lot with deals a librarians and library science. piece, that isl what i am concentrating on in my masters now. so i'm curious, could you talk and if theresearch is any focus on, particularly the archival side of the monument, fine arts and archives section? dr. peiss: yes. because this became a really large project that i did not want to spend the rest my life i enteredto, i mean into some archival material when it followed logically from the book collecting missions. when i looked at the hoover library in particular, which was a really interesting story. hoover was interested in archives, records, diaries, memoirs and other materials of that sort. so i write at length about their efforts, which were more focused on unique items that were archival. there a wonderful book, by a german historian, astrid eckert called the struggle with the files that deals with archives and bring brought to the united states and the effort to return them to germany after the war. >> two questions. the smaller question is this. books are not like works of art or jewels. the was the motivation of inis in losing libraries -- looting library's and countries that the occupied? seems extraordinary for the american government to spend when the attitude was, the war is over, return to normality. who were the people who had such intellectual insight that they could convince the american toernment to pay attention the intellectual treasures of civilization? dr. peiss: great questions. the first one, about looting of -- not to losing a books and why. lootingases -- nazi of books and why. in some cases there were rare collections of books that they seize because they were rare treasures. in many cases they were seizing the libraries of jewish institutions or ordinary jewish individuals. thing to wrap our minds create is they wanted to the scientific study of the jewish or what they would call the jewish race. and they needed all of this, all to put into institutes for advance studies essentially, or scholars could later go and study what they termed the jewish question. after the population of jews had been killed. whos one of the people write about this at the time says, it is this strange irony. but that was her motive. they had an intellectual jews.st in understanding obviously to justify genocide. but that this became part of a science. that is what alfred rosenberg was interested in. the second question. have her but he gives me two questions and i forget the second. important that at the end of the war the united states sees itself as winning the war. this has been a massive effort on the part of government, military, ordinary citizens, the intellectual and academic world, and i think that there is not the sense initially of we are not going to, that's a moment and now it is gone. vista, the war opens up a of postwar intellectual, and political dominance by the united states. it is a great investment by government agencies in scientific research. there is investment in libraries. and the librarians are making that case, at least at the end of the war. and it is that successful argan it. -- a successful argument. one that at this current moment may seem unusual. [laughter] to put it mildly. one more? >> during the war itself. your uncle and his colleagues in wasn'tlm and portugal, it suspicious that somebody with an american accent was looking for a lots of books in german? dr. peiss: you would think. they did not have codenames or secret names. they went on their own names. on their own passports. and they were often identified as working for the library of congress. and the reputation of the library of congress was very prominent and people thought oh yes, of course you want to be here seeking out books. so for the most part, they did not have problems. and portugal do they do not have problems. there was a lot of caution about going into spain, where franco's regime was far more attentive to what this might mean. but, yes, i think that it kind of conjures up the casablanca image of all the spies in the same location. and they're just a lot of people looking for information in these cities. these librarians were among them. the library is a good cover is what i have been told. [laughter] thank you all very much. i appreciate it. 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