The seizure of the Jewish libraries of Poland and Czechoslovakia whetted Alfred’s appetite for the grandest treasure of all—the library at the Rijnsburg Museum. With Spinoza’s library clearly in his sights, Alfred avidly wrote headline after triumphant headline about the Nazi progress on the Western Front. “Nothing can stop our blitzkrieg,” the Beobachter blared. Country after country bowed to Hitler’s force, and before long it was the Netherlands’ turn. Though that small country had remained neutral in World War I and hoped to do the same in the new war, Hitler had different ideas. On May 10, 1940, Nazi troops invaded the Netherlands in full force. Four days later, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed the industrial city of Rotterdam, destroying a full square mile of the city center, and on the following day the Dutch forces capitulated. Alfred was jubilant as he prepared the front-page headlines and story on the five-day Netherlands war for the Völkischer Beobachter and wrote an editorial about the invincibility of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Beobachter staff members were astonished by Alfred’s behavior—never before had they seen him grin so broadly. Could this be Alfred Rosenberg opening bottles of champagne in the office, pouring drinks for everyone, and loudly offering toasts, first to the Führer and then to the memory of Dietrich Eckart?
A few weeks before, Alfred had come across a quote by Albert Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” At first he snorted—“Brazen dishonesty, typical Jewish hypocrisy”—and dismissed it. But for days Einstein’s statement unaccountably returned to his mind. Was it a clue to solving the Spinoza problem? Perhaps the “original” ideas of Bento Spinoza were not so original. Perhaps the real origins of his thoughts were hidden in the pages of the 151 books in his personal library.
The ERR, Alfred’s plundering task force, was ready for action in the Netherlands in February 1941. Alfred flew into Amsterdam and attended a staff meeting organized by Werner Schwier, the German officer responsible for the liquidation of Freemasonry and related organizations in the Netherlands. The Nazis hated Freemasonry, Jewish and non-Jewish members alike. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Freemasonry had “succumbed” to the Jews and had been a major force in Germany’s loss of World War I. Present at the staff meeting were Schwier’s staff of a dozen “provincial liquidators,” each assigned to his own territory. Before the meeting Schwier had asked for Alfred’s approval of the instructions he planned to distribute to the liquidators. All goods with Masonic emblems were to be destroyed: glasses, busts, paintings, badges, jewels, swords, circles, plumbs, trowels, gavels, seven-armed candelabras, and sextants. All wooden goods with irremovable emblems had to be smashed or burned. All Masonic leather aprons were to be cut into quarters and confiscated. Alfred smiled as he read and made only one correction—leather aprons should be cut into sixteen parts before confiscation. All else he approved, and he commended Schwier for his thoroughness.
Then, glancing at his list of sites to be confiscated, he asked, “Herr Schwier, I see you have the Rijnsburg Spinozahuis on this list. Why?”
“The entire Spinoza Association is crawling with Freemasons.”
“Do they hold Freemason meetings in the Spinozahuis?”
“Not to my knowledge. We haven’t discovered the Rijnsburg meeting places yet.”
“I authorize you to arrest all suspected Freemasons but leave the Spinozahuis to the ERR. I’ll personally pay a visit to the Spinozahuis to confiscate the library, and if I find any Freemason material, I’ll turn it over to you.”
“You personally, Reichsleiter? Of course. Do you need assistance? I’d be glad to assign some of my men.”
“Thank you, no. My ERR men are in place, and we’re fully prepared.”
“Is it permissible, Reichsleiter, for me to inquire why this site is important enough to require your personal attention?”
“Spinoza’s library and his works in general may have importance for the Hohe Schule. His library will require my personal attention. It may eventually be displayed in the Museum of Extinct Peoples that the Führer is planning.”
Two days later, at 11 AM, Rosenberg and his chief assistant, Oberbereichsleiter Schimmer, arrived at Rijnsburg in a luxury Mercedes limousine followed by another limousine and a small truck carrying ERR personnel and empty crates. Alfred ordered two troops to guard the caretaker’s house that adjoined the museum and two troops to apprehend the president of the Spinoza Society, who lived a block away. The museum door was locked, but it took little time to fetch the caretaker, Gerard Egmond, who unlocked and opened the door. Alfred strode through the vestibule to the bookcase. It was not as he remembered it—far less packed. He silently counted the books. Sixty-eight.
“Where are the other books?” demanded Alfred.
Looking startled and frightened, the caretaker shrugged his shoulders.
“The other ninety-one books,” said Alfred, drawing his pistol.
“I’m just the caretaker. I know nothing about this.”
“Who does know?”
Just then his men entered with Johannes Diderik Bierens de Haan, the elderly president of the Spinoza Society, a dignified, well-dressed, elderly man with a white goatee and steel-rimmed spectacles. Alfred turned to him, waving his pistol at the half empty bookcase. “We’re here for the library. To put it in a safe place. Where are the other ninety-one books? Do you think we are fools?”
Bierens de Haan appeared shaken but said nothing.
Alfred walked around the room. “And, Herr President, where is Einstein’s poem that used to be hanging right there?” Alfred tapped his pistol against a spot on the wall.
At this point Bierens de Haan seemed entirely bewildered. He shook his head as he mumbled, “I know nothing about any of this. I never in my life saw a poem hanging there.”
“How long have you been in charge?”
“Fifteen years.”
“That guard, that fat disheveled disgrace, who worked here in the early twenties. Acted as if he owned the place. Where is he?”
“You probably mean Abraham. He’s long dead.”
“Lucky man. What a pity. I so wanted to meet him again. You have a family, Herr Spinozahuis President?”
A nod from Bierens de Haan.
“You have two choices: either lead us to the books, and you will return immediately to your family and your warm kitchen, or don’t tell us, and it will be a long cold time before you see them again. We’ll find the books, I assure you, even if we have to take this museum apart plank by plank and leave nothing but a heap of lumber and stones. And we’ll begin that work right now.”
No response from Bierens de Haan.
“And then we’ll do the same to the house next door. And next your own house. We’ll find the books—I assure you.”
Bierens de Haan thought for a moment and then, unexpectedly, wheeled to Egmond and said, “Take them to the books.”
“And I demand the poem also,” added Alfred.
“There is no poem,” Bierens de Haan barked back.
The caretaker led them next door to a concealed closet in the pantry, where the rest of the books were clumsily stored under a canvas wrap and covered with crockery and jars of preserves.
The troops efficiently packed the library and all other goods of value—portraits of Spinoza, a seventeenth-century landscape, a bronze bust of Spinoza, a small reading desk—into wooden crates and carried them to their truck. Two hours later, the plunderers and the treasures were on their way to Amsterdam.
“I’ve taken part in many such operations, Reichsleiter Rosenberg,” said Schimmer during the drive back, “but never one handled more efficiently. It was a privilege to see you in action. How did you know that books were missing?”
“I know a lot about the library. It will be invaluable to the Hohe Schule. It will help us with the Spinoza problem.”
“Spinoza problem?”
“Too complicated now to explain in detail. Let’s just say it’s a major Jewish hoax in philosophy that has gone on for centuries. I mean to give it my
personal attention. Ship the books directly to the Berlin ERR office.”
“And I was impressed with the way you handled the old man. Bloodlessly. Efficiently. He caved in so easily.”
Alfred tapped his forehead. “Show your strength. Show your superior knowledge and your determination. They pretend at great thoughts but tremble at the thought of their home in rubble. As soon as I mentioned no more warm kitchen, the game was over. This is exactly why we shall easily prevail all over Europe.”
“What about the poem?”
“It was of infinitely less value than the books. It was clear he was telling the truth: no one giving up this priceless library would place himself in jeopardy for some scribbled lines of doggerel on a sheet of paper. Most likely it didn’t belong to the museum but was posted by a guard.”
The two Dutchmen sat dejectedly in the caretaker’s kitchen. Bierens de Haan moaned as he held his head. “We betrayed our trust. We were the guardians of the books.”
“You had no choice,” said Egmond. “First, they would have torn down the museum and then torn down this house and would have found not only the books but her as well.”
Bierens de Haan continued to moan.
“What would Spinoza have done?” asked the caretaker.
“I can only imagine he would have chosen virtue. If it’s a choice between saving valuable goods and saving a person, then we must save her.”
“Yes, I agree. Well, they’re gone. Shall I tell her it’s over now?”
Bierens de Haan nodded. Egmond went upstairs and, using a long pole, tapped three times on the corner of the bedroom ceiling. In a couple of minutes the trapdoor opened, a ladder dropped, and a frightened middle-aged Jewish woman, Selma de Vries-Cohen, descended.
“Selma,” said Egmond, “rest easy. They’re gone. They’ve taken everything of value and now will turn to plundering the rest of our country.”
“Why were they here? What did they want?” asked Selma.
“The entire Spinoza library. I have no idea why it was so important to them. It’s a total mystery. They could have easily plucked one Rembrandt from the dozens at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that would have far greater value than all those books together. But I have something for you. One book they missed. There was one Spinoza book in Dutch translation, called Ethica, which I hid separately in my son’s home. They didn’t know about that one, and I’ll bring it to you tomorrow. It might be interesting for you to read it—it’s his major book.”
“Dutch translation? I always thought he was Dutch.”
“He was, but in those days scholars wrote in Latin.”
“Am I safe now?” asked Selma, still visibly trembling. “Is it safe to bring my mother here? Are you, yourself, safe?”
“No one is entirely safe with these beasts loose. But you’re in the safest town in all of Holland. They’ve sealed the museum doors and windows with tape, they’ve abolished the Spinoza Association, and the German government has laid claim to this house. But I very much doubt they’ll ever return to this empty museum. There is nothing else of importance here. Even so, to be entirely safe, I’d like to move you to another spot for a month. Several families in Rijnsburg have volunteered to hide you. You have many friends in Rijnsburg. Meanwhile I need to install a toilet in your room before your mother comes next month.”
When the books arrived in Berlin, Alfred ordered his men to deliver them immediately to his home office. The next morning he took his coffee into his office, sat down, and stared at them, simply luxuriating in the presence and aroma of these precious works—books that Spinoza had held in his hands. For hours he caressed the books and scanned the titles. Some authors were familiar—Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, Tacitus, Petrarch, Pliny, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Aristotle, Epictetus, Seneca, and a five-volume set of the work of Machiavelli. Oh, he lamented, if only I had gone to the gymnasium. I could have read these. No Latin or Greek—the tragedy of my life. Then, with a sudden shock, he realized there was not a single book he could read: none were in German or Russian. There was Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, but his French was only elementary.
And most were entirely unfamiliar: a great many Hebrew texts, probably Old Testaments and biblical commentary, and many authors he had never heard of, such as Nizolius, Josephus, and Pagninus. Some, judging from illustrations, were works on optics (Huygens, Longomontanus), others anatomical (Riolan) or mathematical. Alfred had expected there might be clues to Spinoza’s sources from his bookmarks or marginalia, and he spent the rest of the day turning every page of every book. But in vain—there was nothing, not a trace of Spinoza. By the afternoon, the harsh reality set in: he lacked the knowledge to learn anything about Spinoza from the library. Obviously, his next step must be to seek consultation from classical scholars.
Hitler had other plans for him. Shortly after the library arrived in Rosenberg’s home, four and a half million Nazi troops invaded Russia. Hitler appointed Rosenberg as the Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories and asked him to draw up a master plan for a large area of Western Russia, inhabited by thirty million Russians, to be repopulated by Germans. Fifteen million Russians were to be deported. The other fifteen million were allowed to stay but had to be “Germanized” within thirty years.
Alfred had strong opinions about Russia. He believed that Russia could be defeated only by Russians and that the Germans should strive to Balkanize the country and seek to build fighting forces composed of Ukrainians who would move against Bolshevists.
This high-profile appointment, at first a triumph for Rosenberg, soon turned into a disaster. He submitted his plans to Hitler, but military leaders—Göring, Himmler, and Erich Koch—vehemently disagreed and entirely ignored or undermined all his suggestions. They allowed tens of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war to die in the camps and millions of civilians to die of starvation by shipping all wheat and foodstuffs to Germany. Rosenberg continued complaining to Hitler, who eventually responded harshly: “Stop meddling in military affairs. Your preoccupation with ideological issues has blocked you from contact with day-to-day affairs.”
Million-book best seller. Editor-in-chief of major newspaper. One prestigious government post after another: head of Nazi ideology and education, head of the ERR, Reich minister of occupied eastern territories. Yet always disliked and ridiculed by the Nazi inner circle. How did Rosenberg accrue so many honors? Sometimes abstruse, convoluted, inscrutable prose elicits an unrealistically elevated appraisal of the author’s intelligence. Perhaps that is why Hitler persisted in offering Rosenberg so many demanding assignments.
Eventually, as the Russians began to repel the German forces and regain their territory, Alfred’s position as Reichsminister of the occupied East became irrelevant, and he tendered his resignation. Hitler was too busy to reply.
His hope of an in-depth study of Spinoza’s library never materialized. Before long the Allies were bombing Berlin in force. When a house only two hundred meters from his own was destroyed, Alfred ordered the library shipped to Frankfurt for greater safety.
Alfred’s Völkischer Beobachter, “the fighting newspaper of Nazi Germany,” continued fighting till the end, and Alfred never stopped slavishly honoring Hitler in its pages. In one of its last editions (April 20, 1945) Rosenberg celebrated him on the occasion of his fifty-sixth birthday by hailing Adolf Hitler as the “Man of the Century.” Ten days later, as the approaching Russian army was only a few blocks away from Hitler’s underground bunker, the Führer married Eva Braun, distributed cyanide capsules to the wedding party, wrote his will, and shot himself after his wife swallowed cyanide. Twenty-four hours later, in the same bunker, Goebbels and his wife killed their six children with morphine and cyanide, and then he and his wife committed suicide together. Even so, the Völkischer Beobachter presses continued to roll until the German surrender on May 8, 1945. When its offices were overrun, the Russians found a couple of predated editions. The last undistributed issue, dated May 11, 1945, contained a surv
ival guide entitled “Subsistence in German Fields and Forests.”
After Hitler’s death, Alfred, along with the other surviving Nazi leaders, fled to Flensburg, where Admiral Doenitz, the new head of state, assembled his government. Alfred hoped that he, the senior surviving Reichsleiter, would be asked to join the cabinet. But no one took any heed of his presence. Finally, he sent a carefully worded letter of surrender to Field Marshall Montgomery. But even the British failed to fully appreciate his importance, and Reichsleiter Rosenberg waited impatiently at his hotel for six days before the British military police dropped by to arrest him. Shortly afterward he was placed under American control and was informed that he, along with a small group of major Nazi war criminals, had been singled out to be tried at the Nuremberg special international tribunal.
Major Nazi war criminals! Indeed. A smile flitted across Alfred’s lips.
Meanwhile, in Rijnsburg on VE day, Selma de Vries-Cohen and her elderly mother, Sophie, climbed down the ladder of their tiny room and for the first time in years stepped outside into the sunlight. They walked around the side of the house to the Spinozahuis entrance, where they signed the guest registry—the first signature in four years: “In grateful remembrance of the time we were allowed to hide here. To the Spinoza House and to those who cared so excellently for us and saved our lives from the German threat.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
VOORBURG—DECEMBER 1666
Bento, shaking his head in astonishment, walked over to the huishouder and murmured in Dutch that they would not be having lunch after all.