EUROPE’S LIBRARIES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 65, Issue 268, 23 August 1945, Page 8

EUROPE’S LIBRARIES.

HEAVY LOSS IN THE WAR. f ' MUCH WILFUL DESTRUCTION. Hundreds of European libraries, including some of the finest institutions of their kind, have been devastated by the Nazis, states Dr. Grayson N. Kefauver, who has been in Europe making a survey of the damage for the United States State Department, in a report summarised by the “New York Times.” Many of the libraries were deliberately ruined by the Germans as reprisal or punishment, according to Dr. Kefauver, who found that libraries in England, France, Norway, Poland, Finland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy and Russia had suffered “unprecedented” damage. Replenishing these institutions will constitute a “new problem for the civilised world.” Dr. Kefauver cited the burning. of the Royal Society Library in Naples after the shooting of a German soldier in an adjacent street; the destruction of the Louvain Library collection of 900,000 volumes because each hook carried a bookplate representing a German setting a torch to the university, and the burning of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin. Dr. Kefauver estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of Poland’s libraries had been destroyed or carried away, or had lost their identity by being merged with other collections to form a system of “State” libraries. Some of the best libraries in Ukrainian cities were totally ransacked. The loot is believed to consist of books and manuscripts of special value because of their rarity, or their value as source material. Kiev libraries also were said) to have yielded much loot of this kind. A Czcehoslovakian source estimates that 411 libraries were destroyed. Between 500 and 600 libraries and institutions in Yugoslavia were pillaged. By official decree, Germans' demanded all Slovene books; library buildings in large centres were torn down, and books, if they were not pulped or sent away for other purposes, were ceremoniously burned. Reports reaching American authorities in Cairo have told of the pillaging of libraries, laboratories and workshops of the Universities of Athens and Salonika. A large part of the University of Athens library is reported to he lost. The libraries of the three American colleges were reported to have been used for fuel in the central heating system by the Germans. Most of the libraries of Luxembourg have been denuded of all valuable works. In Belgium the Germans ordered the withdrawal from all libraries of anti-German books and proscribed their sale. Fifty libraries have been damaged or destroyed in England, though the losses include relatively few works that are irreplaceable.