The untold story of the "Führerbibliothek" and the role of the National Library in Vienna

The year is 1941. The date June 6 th. Paul Heigl, director-general of the National Library in Vienna, writes to Reichsleiter Martin Bormann requesting his support in obtaining for the Vienna library a number of precious manuscripts from the looted collection of Alphonse de Rothschild. Ever eager to ingratiate himself with Hitler and his helpers, Heigl stresses just how supportive he and the National Library have been in realizing one of Hitler's pet projects: the so-called "Führerbibliothek" in Linz - not to be confused with Hitler's private library. The National Library in Vienna, since March 1938 the third largest in the Reich after Berlin and Munich, was, in Heigl's view, predestined to obtain the valuable objects. "In support of my request", he writes, "I would just like to mention, as I have done to Dr. Hans Posse on repeated occasion, that the National Library has been setting aside since 1938 all precious duplicates for the building of the big library in Linz on the Danube and is especially pleased to be involved in supplying (books to) this future cultural centre in the 'Heimatgau' of the 'Führer'." Later that year (October), Posse wrote to Heigl with the good news that Hitler had agreed to donate the seven requested manuscripts to the National Library in return for duplicates for the library the "Führer" was planning to build. In other correspondence in 1941, Heigl makes repeated and insistent reference to his endeavour to play a major role in the creation of the Linz library. After all, he had an endless supply of looted books at his disposal.

But allow me to backtrack a bit. Paul Heigl, an Austrian librarian, who was born in Maribor in present-day Slovenia, had been summoned from Berlin to Vienna on March 12 th, 1938, by the new Nazi Chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart and was asked to take over the reigns of the National Library. On March 16 th, Heigl appeared in the Camera praefecti on the Josefsplatz and virtually ousted Dr. Josef Bick, who had been director-general since 1926. Bick, as a representative of the despised "ancien régime", the so-called "Systemzeit", was arrested, sent to the Dachau concentration camp, then to Sachsenhausen near Berlin where he was interrogated and then released in the summer of 1938. He was placed under house arrest in his home community of Piesting south of Vienna and was ultimately reinstated after the war in 1945. Heigl himself - a pronounced anti-Semetic who published his freemason conspiracy theories under an assumed name in 1927, was a staunch supporter of the Nazi party, indeed he'd had been a member since 1933. And had been involved in the so-called "July putsch" of Austrian National Socialists, which ended in the death of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, something which led to Heigl's arrest on treason charges.

Heigl's cited assertion that he had been collecting books at the National Library for the "Führerbibliothek" since 1938 would tend to support the theory a) that he was in the picture at a very early stage and b) that Hitler brought up the subject of a library in Linz - in addition to an art museum - when he visited his adopted city on the 8 th of April, two days ahead of a plebiscite on Austria's inclusion into a Greater Germany. During his stay in Linz, Hitler spent an hour at the provincial museum speaking to Theodor Kerschner, the museum's director, about his ambitious building plans for the city. It is, by the way, the front page story in the Linz newspaper Tages-Post the very next day. The earliest reported reference to the still "virtual" library is in early 1940. It's a letter written by Hans Posse from the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, who was appointed Hitler's special envoy for the "Sonderauftrag Linz" in June of 1939, to a senior ministry official in Vienna, Friedrich Plattner, in February 1940. Under discussion is how to deal with the confiscated art and book collection of Rudolf Gutmann in light of the fact that - as Posse relates - Hitler wants a graphic art collection in the Linz art museum and places special importance on a library. As we know, Hitler had in the meantime been purchasing book collections and libraries, as, for example, that of the Vienna lawyer Ludwig Töpfer. In a letter from Posse to Herbert Seiberl from the Monument Protection Office in Vienna in late April 1941, Hitler's envoy Posse underlines Hitler's interest in obtaining objects from Gutmann's collections for Linz. It is in the same month we learn that Dr. Friedrich Wolffhardt, who had studied German in Munich, Erlangen and Rostock, had been put in charge of planning the "Führerbibliothek", executing those plans and thus collecting books for the Linz library.

Behind the scenes in the course of 1941, Paul Heigl devoted a great deal of his time to the "Führerbibliothek", ensuring a continual supply of books and making repeated offers. In addition to Gutmann, there was the invaluable collection of Old Vienna theatre material belonging to Fritz Brukner. With a little help from the Gestapo and amid veiled threats from Heigl himself, Brukner was only too willing to sell his collection to the National Library for an outrageously low price. Duplicates were to be donated to Linz. Thanks to Heigl, who had looted around 80,000 books and other objects from the Saint Gabriel mission house at Mödling near Vienna, the Linz library was to receive desired books from that source as well. Heigl's generosity knew no bounds - nor his unscrupulousness - when it came to Hitler's library in Linz. He also had big plans the same year to loot the abbey library at Klosterneuburg near Vienna and supply the "Führerbibliothek" with incunabula and other valuable books. In the end, the National Library was only allowed to take over the administration of the library. He also negotiated the sale of a major collection - around 3,000 volumes - of theatre literature to the "Führerbibliothek", as there were also plans to establish a theatre collection in Linz. But Heigl made smaller gifts as well. From his vast collection of duplicates stemming from looted libraries, he also donated books belonging to the Vienna publisher Gottfried Bermann-Fischer and the son of Arthur Schnitzler, Heinrich Schnitzler, to name but a few. Just as a footnote, the National Library in the persons of Paul Heigl and Joseph Gregor, head of the theatre collection, was also involved in the acquisition of another major collection for Hitler's museum and library in Linz, namely that of Edward Gordon Craig, who was one of Hitler's favourite artists. Hitler personally purchased the gigantic collection for his museum and theatre collection in Linz. For its efforts, the National Library received what Heigl called "a wonderful gift from the Führer". There is evidence from correspondence in 1942 and indeed the following years of concrete cooperation between Wolffhardt's "Führerbibliothek" and the library in Vienna. Wolffhardt, for example, sent a librarian to Vienna to type lists of duplicates for the holdings of the Linz Library.

In the meantime, Friedrich Wolffhardt continued to develop the "Führerbibliothek" in theory and practice from his office in the so-called "Führerbau" in Munich, to where he had moved in September 1941. Based on records first published by Gerhart Marckhgott in an article in 1995, we know that Wolffhardt was busy collecting books for the "Führerbibliothek", many of them apparently forwarded from the office of Reichsleiter Bormann. By the end of September 1943, fewer than 3,000 books had been catalogued. An inventory dated 30 November, 1943 reveals that Wolffhardt had spent over 340,000 Marks on books, manuscripts and periodicals, two thirds of which had come from sources within Germany itself. In an interim report from July 1943, Wolffhardt speaks of a library with around one million books, but at the "going rate", as it were, it would have taken forever to reach that number. In his copious report, Wolffhardt includes an actual building plan for the library and as far as acquisitions are concerned he remarks that crates full of valuable books are lying around in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig and Heidelberg just waiting to be picked up and brought to the new library. He also lists in some detail just what the "Führerbibliothek" should be collecting. But in 1943 the war was making its presence felt and toward the middle of the year plans were drawn up to evacuate the more or less "virtual" Führerbibliothek to a safer place. In early August 1943, the evacuation of books from Munich began. They were taken to what was to become the library's headquarters until the end of the war - as the "Partei-Kanzlei" - in the picturesque community of Grundlsee on the lake of the same name in what was then "Gau Oberdonau". The choice was ideal: the spacious so-called "Villa Castiglioni", built in the 1880s on the shore of the Grundlsee and named after one of the later owners, the banker and industrialist Camillo Castiglioni.

We actually know very little about the daily work which went on in the "Villa Castiglioni" until the first days of May, 1945. The Consolidated Interrogation Report Number 4 from the year 1945 speaks of a 'staff of assistants and clerks, headed by Dr. Ludwig Lang, making card catalogues and inventories. Given the fact that Wolffhardt had spoken of the need for ten trained librarians and between five and ten bookbinders to work in Grundlsee, it would be an understatement to say that the "Führerbibliothek" was understaffed.

Eager to serve Hitler on the battlefield, Wolffhardt was on the lookout for someone to replace him as boss of the "Führerbibliothek". In Graz he got to know a young librarian at the Styrian provincial library by the name of Gertraut Laurin, a niece of the writer Peter Rosegger. From October 1944 onwards - when Wolffhardt left to join the war effort - and until she fled Grundlsee in early May 1945, Laurin was chief of the Adolf Hitler library and thus responsible for acquisitions as well. Nothing was ever made public about her brief career after the war. Indeed up to the present day.

Paul Heigl committed suicide in Vienna together with his wife in the early days of April 1945. American forces impounded the "Villa Castiglioni" in May 1945. To make a long story short, there were around 55,000 volumes located there. Other books and material had been evacuated to the salt mines at Altaussee. As the Austrian librarian Franz Konrad Weber was able to ascertain during a visit in 1947, there were still vast numbers of books from Austrian provenances. His list is around five pages long. In the end, several thousand books of many and varied sources, some of which still had call numbers from the National Library, were returned to the Austrian National Library. The vast majority of the books were taken from Grundlsee to Linz, then to Munich and the Offenbach Archival depot. Some, but not all of the books were restituted to their rightful owners, whereby ill-informed librarians and library directors made no distinction between provenances such as "Führerbibliothek", so-called "Gestapo-Bibliothek" in Vienna and the "Hauptarchiv" in Munich. It may come as a surprise - or perhaps not - that previously looted books originating from the "Führerbibliothek" in Grundlsee were discovered in the stacks of the Austrian National Library only a few years ago. The story of the Vienna library's involvement in the "Adolf Hitler Library" in Linz both during and after the war - conspicuous by its absence in the official library history of 1973 - has only now been told. The chapter is part of a comprehensive history of the National Library during the Nazi period in Austria, written by the author and Christina Köstner. The well-illustrated book will appear in the spring of 2006.