On the track of the Nazi past
THE "Wiener Library" serves as an important London link with the years of Hitler and with the new Germany emerging after the War. It was founded in Amsterdam in 1934 by an enlightened German emigré scholar and businessman, Dr. Alfred Wiener, and, with its unique collection of pamphlets, press cuttings, books provided not only a centre for the study of National Socialism but also of the Weimar Republic. In the summer of 1939 and with the help of British Government money at the instance of the British historian Sir John Wheeler Bennett, Dr. Wiener managed to bring his collection to safety in London and soon it increased to over 50,000 books covering now also the development in postwar Germany.
In a way the Wiener Library is, as a British popular newspaper once said, "a Library of Horrors" or, as an early visitor, Thomas Mann, put it, "a testimony to a degradation of man such as had not occurred at any time in the history of civilisation". But it is more than that and also shows man's courage and goodness which the Hitler regime could not destroy and which survived with some of his victims and with the countless Germans opposed to the Nazi abominations. When Dr. Theodor Heuss, the President of the Federal Republic, came to Britain in 1958 on the first German State Visit, he insisted on visiting the Library privately on his last day and was taken around by the Director Dr. Wiener, whom he had known in pre-war days. He was shown a secret SS-dossier of Nazi opponents naming Heuss, too, in the section of dangerous writers. The half hour which the President spent at 4 Devonshire Place was seen by the Daily Mail as "the most moving act of the entire State Visit".
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Wiener Library the then Chancellor Willy Brandt said: "It is encouraging that from the study of the tragic past an institute of contemporary history has developed which concerns itself with the present and looks ahead to the future." Successive German Ambassadors have paid tribute to the Wiener Library's role in analysing, as Dr. Jürgen Ruhfus put it in 1983, "the evil spirit and mechanics of the Nazi dictatorship and trying to comprehend the incomprehensible". The Government of the Federal Republic has helped financially to keep the Library going and save it from dispersal.
