sneaking stolen secrets out of occupied countries, much useful information was found in published sources, books, newspapers, and other documents. kathy peiss' latest book explores how the quest for information led to the recruit andibrarians, scholars archivists in collecting and organizing books and documents. they were skilled in collecting and organizing books and documents. their work has left its own archival trail that other scholars and now follow. they sifted through the state department records here at the national archives in college park and the herbert hoover presidential library in iowa. researchers today pursue their missions in research rooms and online relying on the skills of archives and library professionals, and i am proud of our staff at the national archives and the work they do to assist the modern information hunters. kathy peiss is a professor of american history at the university of pennsylvania where she teaches courses on modern american cultural history and the history of american sexuality, women and gender. she is the author of chief amusements, working women in leisure at any turn of the century new york, zoot suit, an antibiotic character and extreme -- innate maddock -- an eni gmatic 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. peiss is a fellow of the society of american historians and serves on the the executive board. in addition to writing and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and public history projects. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome kathy peiss. [applause] prof. peiss: thank you. it is such a pleasure to be here, and i need to give a very strong note of thanks to the national archives not only for inviting me but much more importantly for its collections and extraordinary archivists. i could not have written this book without the national archives, so i am deeply grateful. we know the big 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. in recent years we have also come to appreciate the unusual alliance between the cultural world and the battlefield during world war ii, especially the american curators and museum specialists who saved art and culture in wartime europe, the monuments men, a unique unit of the american military during the war. there are still many hidden stories on the margins of battlefields that shed light on the war and its broad 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 oldest brother, rubin peiss, who died in 1952 at age 40. i learned for the first time about his surprising life about 16 years ago. he was the eldest son in a jewish immigrant family, received 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 then earned a library degree. and 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. at the end of the war, he had a -- he headed a mission at the library of congress to obtain all works published in germany and occupied countries for american libraries. i spent many odd 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 rubin peiss. he died before i was born. but his light became an integral part of mine for many years. his story led me to the information hunters, an unlikely band of librarians, scholars, spies, and soldiers whose more -- war effort centered on books and documents. they gathered enemy publications in stockholm and lisbon, search ed for records and liberated paris, the rubble of berlin. they seized nazi works and bookstores and schools, and they unearthed millions of books hidden in german and mines and caves and mineshafts. improvising the techniques of librarians in wartime conditions, they contributed to allied intelligence, safeguarded endangered collections, and restituted looted books. and they built up the international holdings of american libraries. these men and a few women came together in a series of mass collecting efforts that originated in the unique conditions of world war ii, and i think they offer a contrast or a complement to the monuments men, which was a army unit that grew out of a presidential commission dedicated to the cultural protection of heritage in war zones. books i think 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. so just a word about books. it is worth recalling that books serve readers in many ways. they are sources of useful information, they are forms of communication, they are material or physical objects, and a they are a record of cultural heritage. in total war these attributes , became terrains of battle. more than in any previous war, world war ii required the mobilization of knowledge to fight the enemy. the war's ideological confrontations sharply contrasted freedom and fascism, which were played out in the realm of books, propaganda, and mass media. the uprooting, pillaging destruction of culture to armed , -- through armed conflict and the third reich's policies drew new attention to preserving records of civilization in a time of war. so each of these elements brought together american librarians and scholars, soldiers and spies, during the war and the immediate postwar period. the story begins with intelligence. so the u.s. government had a limited capacity for foreign intelligence gathering on the eve of the war. the fbi had ramped up its compilation of dossiers on domestic threats, intercepted mail. american embassies reported on foreign developments. the armed services began to ramp up military intelligence. but the u.s. was behind france and germany in intelligence gathering, and as the international crisis mounted, president roosevelt came to believe that the government needed a more robust intelligence capability. 1945 he appointed william donovan, a decorated world war i veteran, boyer, and political operative to build a civilian intelligence agency. this became known as the office of strategic services. initially the agency however was called the coordinator of information, and i would just underscore that name. it was this new attention to information that led to these wartime collecting missions. my first focus on the prosaic task of gathering and analyzing non-secret publications and documents, and to do this, donovan enlisted the help of archibald macleish, an unlikely pair who spent a lot of time together. the famed poet, playwright, and at the time, the librarian of congress. mcleish, the library had become a site of a new cultural alliance. he was an ardent interventionist and raised the stakes for librarians. he called on them to not only be custodians of culture, but also defenders of freedom. as he eloquently put it in 1940, "in such a time as ours when wars are made against the spirit and its works, the keeping of these records is a kind of warfare, the keepers, whether they so wish are not, cannot be neutral." strangely enough the origins of america's intelligence apparatus might be traced to the meetings of these two 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 of course remain important. donovan and mcleish believed that intelligence could be gleaned from the close analysis of open sources, using the methods and tools of scholarship, which might reveal information useful for the war effort. foreign newspapers, scientific periodicals industrial , directories and the like were in great demand. the international book trade was shut down by the war, so other means of acquisition had to be found. and so not long after the attack on pearl harbor, they formed an agency that has a very unwieldy name. the international -- the interdepartmental committee for the acquisition of foreign publications, known as the idc. it was chaired by william langer, a harvard based historian and the head of the research and analysis branch. and it was run by a 28-year-old franklin kilgore who was recruited from harvard library. kilgore in turn recruited my uncle rubin into the oss. he was 90 years old when i had the opportunity to meet him. he was still very sharp and had the habits of an intelligence agent. he had like selective hearing loss when there was a question he did not want to answer. the acquisitions committee got off to a very slow start. they failed to acquire a single item in its four months. firstfinally in april 1942, they began to send librarians and scholars abroad to collect material. initially they thought they could get away with just one or two people, but the program rapidly expanded into lisbon, temple,m, london, his kyra -- istanbul, cairo, new delhi. 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. her name was adele tibor. she had an unusual background, she had grown up in hollywood with the family connected to the film industry. but she had a scholarly bent and went to the university of chicago for a phd in medieval linguistics, which she earned in 1930. like many women of her era, she was denied an academic career. instead she carried on her own research while employed by senior faculty at chicago to go abroad and either copy or photograph rare books and manuscripts for their scholarship. at the vatican library in 1934, she began to observe scholars rapidly filming their research using small cameras. and she trained herself to do the same. she was in germany when the war broke out. she participated in an air raid drill in nature and library. she left paris just ahead of the german invasion, made her way to lisbon, and then returned to the united states in 1941. march 18 months later, she returned to europe, this time to stockholm, to microfilm enemy publications for the oss. she worked very closely with british intelligence, but she also developed her own channels of access through booksellers, through sympathetic librarians, government agencies. and she also engaged in covert acquisitions. she made contact with the danish resistance and the clandestine press. she worked with the british to smuggle periodicals into sweden from germany. there are also our family stories that she was engaged in espionage along the coast of occupied france. i have not been able to prove this in the national archives records. her personal record -- her personnel record in college park contains only a single sheet of paper. so somebody raided it at some point. she is still a woman of mystery. she was certainly the most secretive of the agents. frustrating her bosses, who newsy letterssend and thought she might be overwhelmed by the job. in fact she was the most effective agent in the oss acquisitions program, gathering microfilming them and relaying them to london. the other large operation was in lisbon, in neutral lisbon, where despite the dictatorship of antonio salazar, book dealers at -- and news stands did a very brief business in other periodicals from all other europe. lisbon was a magnet for intelligence agents from all of the warring countries. these included some american librarians, including ruben peiss, and ralph carrothers, 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 also gathering secret materials. he was a dashing and popular figure at the library of congress, and he wrote these elaborate wonderful letters, , back calling his employer , elsi, and sanchez portrayed himself as a character in a spy novel. his closest contacts were the andrade brothers owners of the , library in portugal, who were ally sympathizers who went with him to franco spain, where they approached german owned bookstores and acquired works that would have been too dangerous for the americans to collect on their own. the oss agents carrothers and peiss competed with sanchez to collect their work, and they made the abounds at bookstores, took buying trips into the hinterland, that photograph on the top left, and they cultivated sympathetic locals to loan secret items or be fronts for subscriptions. initially, the oss was given an allotment of 165 pounds a month for air shipments, which was a very limited amount, a limited weight. thehey microfilmed most of material they acquired, camera -- acquired. their camera equipment was located in an out-of-the-way room at the american consulate, 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 iberian peninsula, gregory thomas, which argus, whiche was peiss too reuben introduce him to dulles. the spymaster in switzerland. this was buried deep in an accordion file in the field station records. the result was a massive and nearly overwhelming quantity of material. by the end of 1942, their first year, over one million pages had been duplicated and distributed to american government agencies and the numbers continued to grow. operations, kibr e's unit produced 3000 microfilmed periodicals. it is difficult to gauge the intelligence value of these acquisitions. the committee claimed 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 works and the like directly from access in occupied countries could be mined for useful information. they could indicate enemy troop strength. they gave suggestions of new weaponry. levels of industrial production, transportation, and there are even ways to estimate enemy deaths by extrapolating from obituaries. so again the kind of skills and scholarship being applied to these materials. many wartime officials also perceived open sources to be highly important, and they invested considerable energy analyzing them. to make these sources useful, techniques of information management had to be employed to transform the physical object -- in this case microfilm -- into the genre of intelligence. so they extracted useful information. they indexed it, provided abstracts, and they translated 4% of all materials they are -- they acquired into 42 languages. this was quite an operation. information disaggregated , content, not the publications themselves, were the intelligence product. in a time before computers were not available for this work the , oss hired a small army of indexers and translators, most emigres,ere women and to carry this on. the oss mission into neutral cities became less important after d-day for obvious reasons. at that point the information hunters became integrated into military operations. if they were assigned to documents gathering teams called t forces, added these forces followed behind the allies' armies as they advanced, scouring targets for operational or strategic information. they wore army uniforms and they operated under military command. serving as specialists to select archival records and publications often on-the-fly, like instantaneous decisions. although an unlikely role for bibliophiles and scholars, many took to this work. one of them was private max lobe. i don't have a photograph of him. he was a german-born journalist, he 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 more generally to people concerned about the fate of books. finney agent, ross lee was an avant-garde composer and , music professor at smith college, who you see on the right. he 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 in cambridge. as he wrote his wife, my work involves different methods of acquiring foreign publications than i or anyone in north hampton massachusetts , would use. he learned how to interrogate informants and follow suspicious people. he said i find i am pretty good at sniffing down an aisle and tracing things. and he found massive quantities of printed materials, which he confiscated. i requisitioned a two and a half ton truck today, he wrote. i need a convoy actually. on thanksgiving 1944, he made his biggest discovery, a huge cache of patent abstracts, which were sent back to the u.s. the t forces looked for material with immediate intelligence value, research related to weaponry and other war-related materials and records that might be useful in the prosecution of war crimes. 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. as max lobe said, as he was engaged in this work there were , so many tempting targets, that even after a successful day, he felt uneasy because there is so much undone. he had seized 1000 books that day and 12 rungs of periodicals. although they were ordered to respect the integrity of libraries, they considered collections that were in the service of nazism to be fair game. for example, there is an institute for race studies housed in a university library. that they removed, but not the library's other collections. they took endangered booked as well. as one officer in cologne explained, we felt no qualms about going into bubble which -- rubble which used to be bookstores and removing any items of value because they would have been destroyed. but there is also the sense of having a certain 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 period of the snatch with the really anything goes. it was another story when military government was in place. ae officer went into bookstore in bonn, and the germans were looking at him and he felt too uncomfortable seizing this stuff, so he paid cash for the lot. as the investigators dug more deeply, they found vast quantities of books and publications stashed in surprising places. in the wake of bombing raids, german authorities had hidden library collections in caves, mines and other places along with other treasures. gold, artwork, and costumes of the berlin state opera had been up part ofo yielded the precious state library, piled in disarray were 2 million volumes of books and journals , historical maps and other materials, and there was no catalog there. tragically, a fire had burned for several months in the mine. likely set by refugees trying to keep warm, and as one investigator reported the books , were in the process of gradual destruction from smoke, fumes and damp. this w