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 peiss and other scholars can now follow. Peiss herself has sifted through the state Department Records here at the National Archives in college park and the Herbert Hoover president ial 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 very proud of our staff here at the National Archives in the daily 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 in turnofthecentury jar,rk, and hope in a americas beauty culture, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award, and named one of amazons 1999 top 100 books in womens 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 consultant to museums archives and public history of projects. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome kathy peiss. [applause] prof. Peiss thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here. I need to give a very strong note of thanks to the National Archives not only for inviting me, that 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 decisionmaking 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. But there are still many hidden stories on the margins of battlefields that shed light on the war and its broad impact on american life. And this is one of those stories. It was revealed to me unexpectedly when i stumbled upon a memorial to my fathers 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 wpafunded 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 headed a mission at the library of congress to obtain all works andished in germany germanoccupied 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 life 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 the highridden cities of stockholm and lisbon, searched for records in liberated paris, the rubble of berlin. They seized nazi works and bookstores and schools, and they unearthed millions of books hidden in german caves and mine shafts. 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 an army unit that grew out of a president ial commission dedicated to the cultural protection of heritage in war zones. Books, i think, are less straightforward than our treasures, and many different decisionmakers 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 they are a record of Cultural Heritage. In a total war, these general attributes became terrains of battle. More than in any previous war, world war ii required the mobilization of knowledge to fight the enemy. The wars 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 through Armed Conflict and the third reichs policies drew new attention to preserving the 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 fda 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 some of their military intelligence. But the u. S. Was behind france and germany in intelligencegathering. As the International Crisis mounted, president roosevelt came to believe that the government needed a more robust intelligence capability. In july of 1945, he appointed william donovan, known as wild bill, a decorated world war i veteran, lawyer and political operative to build a civilian intelligence agency. This became known as the office of strategic services. Initially, the agency however the coordinator of information treated i would underscore that inamed, because it was this new attention to information that led to these wartime collecting missions. They first focused on the prosaic task of gathering and analyzing nonsecret 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. Under macleish, the library had become a site of a new cultural alliance. He was an ardent interventionist , and he urgently raised the stakes for librarians. He called them not only as custodians of culture, but also defenders of freedom. As he eloquently put it in 1940, quote 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 or not, cannot be neutral. Strangely enough the origins of americas intelligence apparatus might be traced to the meetings of these two men in the summer of 1941. You tend to think of intelligence in terms of the exploits of spies, secret operations, decoded messages, but publicly available information, open sources were important and remained important. Ish believedmacle 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. Not long after the attack on pearl harbor, they formed an agency that has a very unwieldy name. I will only say at once, 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 28yearold franklin kilgore who was recruited from harvard library. Kilgore intern recruited my 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 something of the habits of an intelligence agent. Lossd selective hearing loss when there was a question he didnt want to answer. The Acquisitions Committee got off to a slow start. They failed to acquire a single item in its first four months. Finally 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, stockholm, london istanbul, cairo, new delhi. I am going to 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 dealadele keiber. 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 a german library. She left paris just ahead of the german invasion, made her way to lisbon, and then returned to the United States in march 1941. 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 you also develop 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. And she worked with the british to smuggle periodicals into sweden from germany. There also are family stories that she was engaged in asp imagine along the coast of occupied france. I have not been able to prove this in the National Archives records 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 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 wanted her to send newsy letters and thought she might be overwhelmed by the job. In fact, she was the most effective agent in the oss acquisitions program, gathering sources, 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 and newsstands did a very brisk business in german and other periodicals from all over 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, who was a microfilm expert from the new york public library, Manuel Sanchez who was sent separately by the library of congress. Sanchez arrived first and after shaking off some portuguese undercover agents who were tailing him, he bound up being he wound up being very 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, of course, protrude himself as a character in a spy novel. His closest contacts were the ade brothers, who were owners of the library in portugal, who were ally sympathizers who went with him to francos 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 also made inbounds 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 weight. So they microfilmed most of the material they acquired. Their camera equipment was located in an outoftheway room at the american consulate, and it was often going on 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. And it was the card of the head of the oss in the iberian peninsula, gregory thomas, whose codename was argus, which he tot with ruben peiss whom, of course thethe head of the oss and 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. By the end of operations,kibers unit alone produced 3000 wheels reels of 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 of the budget 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 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 of them were women and emigres, to carry this on. The oss mission into neutral cities became less important after dday for obvious reasons. At that point, the informationhunters became integrated into military operations. They were assigned to documentsgathering teams, called t forces. They followed behind the allied 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 onthefly, like instantaneous decisions. Although an unlikely role for bibliophiles and scholars, many of them took to this work. One of them was private max lobe. I do not have a photograph of him, unfortunately. 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. Another agent, ross lee finney, was an avantgarde composer and music professor at smith college, whom you see on the right. He volunteered to do oss acquisitions work. He arrived after the liberation of paris, went from targeted to target to target identified on a long list, some of which he had 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 needed 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. T