I posted on this forum on January 31 about the real Monuments Men and
Women and the Nazi Looted Art. A recent article in the New York Times tells
about how the Allied armies' Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives also saved
books and the online exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in New York
City. This is part of the ongoing effort to trace the origins of the
millions of volumes that the Nazis seized >from libraries as they marched
through Europe. Many of the books remain in Germany. The article notes over
three million books ended up in the Offenbach archival depot outside of
Frankfurt where book stamps and other marks provided clues to their
provenance. The online exhibit plots the locations of the libraries whose
stamps appear in scrapbooks compiled by Col. Seymour Pomrenze, the American
officer in charge of the project. The scrapbooks are now held at the
American Jewish Historical Society, one of the Center for Jewish History's
partners. This is an ongoing project as over 3,000 stamps are yet to
catalogued and one-third yet to be identified. Thousands of books were
returned to the original libraries.

To read the New York Times Article go to: http://tinyurl.com/m6un7so
Original url:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/online-exhibit-tracks-books-saved-by-the-real-life-monuments-men/?_php=true&;_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=3

To read more about the Nazi looted books see the Bloomberg article >from last
year:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-07/nazi-looted-books-spell-decades-of-labor-for-libraries.html
http://tinyurl.com/cwgzo54

To see the bookmarks and where they were found on an European map see the
display on flickr: http://tinyurl.com/kuktrth
Original url:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36988361@N08/sets/72157637913299945/map?&;fLat=52.4024&fLon=42.2753&zl=4&order_by=recent

To view a collection of the book stamps see: http://tinyurl.com/kchkwlz
Original url:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/center_for_jewish_history/sets/72157637913299945/

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee