“With the growing international crisis, he raised the stakes for books and democracy, calling upon librarians to be not merely custodians of culture but defenders of freedom. Like Donovan, he had perceived the dangers of fascism early and believed in American intervention. As an artist, intellectual, and the nation’s leading librarian, he was convinced, as he later put it, that ‘the country of the mind must also attack.’”

“The war challenged these librarians, archivists, scholars, and bibliophiles to turn their knowledge of books and records toward new and unpredictable ends. The immediacy and intensity of their experience tested them psychologically and physically. Whether soldier or civilian, American-born or émigré, these people’s lives changed as they engaged in this unusual wartime enterprise. They stepped up to the moment, confronting shifting and perplexing circumstances armed only with vague instructions and few precedents to guide them.”

Communications scholars studied totalitarian radio and press to understand and counteract propaganda

Late 1930s development of microfilm enabled better information storage and retrieval

Library of Congress head MacLeish, June 1940: “The keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.”

A proposed “microphotographic expeditionary force” to reproduce every book in Europe failed to materialize, but were able to microfilm materials throughout Britain

Hoover War Library collected war ephemera (Quaker Hoover wanted them preserved “if humanity were to understand what led nations to collective violence and war”)

Gathering timely and relevant info from war territories proved difficult, but after Pearl Harbor an FDR executive order establish OSS committee to acquire foreign publications via microfilm for war agencies

“As bookmen and women became intelligence agents, the ordinary activities of librarianship — acquisition, cataloguing, and reproduction—became fraught with mystery, uncertainty, and even danger.”

Open source works not sufficiently timely or informative to guide military operations, but impact more with information methods of microfilm and info management/access

T-Force collecting teams descended after D-Day and liberation of Paris to gather documents: to aid war planners, provide evidence of war crimes, get intel about Pacific theater and Soviet postwar plans

Anticipating bombings, the Nazi party relocated valuable records to countryside homes, monasteries

Scramble for documents in early 1944 “a particular form of trophy taking, in which knowledge about technical matters, scientific advances, and state secrets were the spoils of war”

LOC Mission focused on book buying of post-1933 works in Germany and occupied zones

After V-E Day, acquisition between different zones of occupation between America, British, Soviets proved challenging

Mission creep of LOC’s “rule of three” collecting mandate spanned published and not, banned Nazi lit, presented political and ethical ambiguities

Allies Order No. 4 in May 1946 prohibited books that promoted Nazism, fascism, etc, and ordered their confiscation and destruction, but got pushback