Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

In the United States, fascism is on the rise. Libraries are under attack. Some pundits ask why universities bother with departments that don’t just teach students to write computer code. Violent bigotry is fashionable again, and for many people, the appeal of politics is the opportunity to impose cruelty on others. The admonition to remember has never seemed so important.

The historical record often neglects certain kinds of stories. For example, in the Library of Congress, OSS veterans helped catalogue the OSS records; this was a good service to the country, but they often catalogued the names of men and not the names of women. In memoirs that men wrote about the war years, the names of women are, likewise, often absent – they’re “a shapely analyst.” Say or “a woman from Harvard.” I’m grateful to have a way to fill in the stories of figures who, despite their importance, don’t receive their due space in the archives.

The Jewish poet Heinrich Heine was right to say, “Those who burn books will, in the end, burn people.” In 1933, Hitler gave the order to burn books. In 1941, he gave the order to burn people.

And second, in the fight against the Nazis, refugees like Cohen and the Clarks ultimately helped turn the tide of the war. Nazi Europe based its whole identity on forming an in-group that violently excluded these people. America, when it honored its best values, welcomed them. It's the American way: welcoming strangers, seizing the practical gains of diversity, finding common cause between aristocrats and thieves.

Authoritarian regimes, in the words of Robert Hutchings, a scholar of public affairs and the former chair of the US National Intelligence Council, are prey to "intellectual pathologies" that drastically narrow what they're capable of thinking: intense conformity, resistance to contrary information, the overestimation of insiders and the stereotyping of outsiders. Authoritarianism is a catastrophic intellectual handicap.

The OSS and the SOE learned early on that lone saboteurs can take down their targets more effectively than fleets of bomber planes; that small groups of people on foot can go where squadrons of tanks can't; that ordinary people with local knowledge can foil the plans of occupying generals-that, in short, the monumental power Hitler's regime worshipped could be outmaneuvered by precisely the weakness he despised in others.

Authoritarianism is a catastrophic intellectual handicap.

Women, as you must know, have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men. Men usually want a mate with them.

Again and again, Sweden tilted its neutrality in Germany's favor to the point where onlooker suggested that Germany accepted Sweden's neutrality because it benefited Germany more than occupying Sweden would have done.

The Nazis demanded that the press in Sweden normalize, treat as credible, and give equal time to Nazism. That strategy extended to newspapers, but also libraries, bookstores, and universities. These efforts worked to legitimize ideas that were once abhorent.

An observer who had been living in Sweden wrote in 1943, "Perhaps the most curious phenomenon of Swedish press policy was that every, even the tamest bit of criticism directed against the Nazis had to be invariably compensated by a corresponding poke of the allies so as to safeguard Sweden's neutrality. Is there a safe place on the sidelines of a conflict like this one?

Sweden had no formal system of press censorship. Instead, newspaper editors censored their own papers in the name of maintaining neutrality, which some historians have argued better served the interests of the Third Reich than flagrant government censorship would have done.

The hard work of assembling the libraries of the RSHA and its sister organizations came, in large part, from the compelled labor of Jewish scholars, who were forced to identify their own cultural treasures.

The RSHA seized Jewish books so that the so-called scholars of Department VII could use them—with a backbreaking amount of reading against the grain—to “prove” that the Jews were conspiring against Western civilization.

Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, hereafter the RSHA), an intelligence body that managed the planning and implementation of the Final Solution, and which collected Jewish books to use while working up a justification for wiping out the Jewish people.

Men want women to smile, which means that getting them to treat you like a man often means not smiling. Don’t laugh. Don’t say little reassuring things. Be curt in a way they’d read as normal in a man but as arrogant in a woman. Or as angry in a woman.

The word for cozy in Swedish, treflig, carries with it a whole world of meanings: a warm little nook to sit in after you’ve been outside in weather so cold that the air hurts your face; a good book; a cup of mulled wine; warmth; solitude; respite.47 Nordiska Bokhandeln was treflig.

This is the traditional task of the historian: sitting for days and months in archives, riffling through the evidence until the evidence starts to whisper.

The bureaucratic efficiency that we associate with the Nazi regime relied on the recognition that paperwork can hide accountability for even the most abominable acts.

He frequently, and unexpectedly, would draw the knife from its concealed location and place the point at either the throat or stomach of various OSS personnel whom he was meeting for the first time.

Gentlemen may not read other people’s letters, but scholars do. They’re good at it.

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.

In the mid-twentieth century...the CIA, together with other government entities such as the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA), began a program of investment in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had been founded in 1936 to build an American home for the world's literati.

But the thing about stories is that you don’t always get to choose the one you’re in.

Hitler's impression of America's weaknesses started with the fact that it was a nation filled with what he saw as lesser races. Hitler also despised intellectuals, regarding any career that entailed digging through libraries as particularly pointless. But that type of thinking was why the very people Hitler's Reich sought to exclude or destroy were singularly equipped to defeat him.

She was also a woman, which for him was a plus.

... because knowledge is, itself, a kind of magic, regardless of whether you get it from the stars or from the sublunary hermeneutics of the human fields of learning.