2024/04/30 by Erdle, Birgit R.
#900 Geschichte und Geografie::940 Geschichte Europas::940 Geschichte Europas #Arno Nadel #Reichssicherheitshauptamt #diary #forced labor #handwriting #intertextuality
paper · doi:10.14279/depositonce-20434
From February 1942 on, Arno Nadel spent many hours a day as a forced laborer in the ‘Central Library’ of the ‘Reich Security Main Office’ in Berlin. Nadel was responsible for cataloguing looted books from all over Europe – most taken from various Jewish communities, many written in Hebrew. Perpetually threatened, Arno Nadel kept secret diaries until he was deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. In digitalized form, the extant diary notebooks comprise approximately 1033 sheets. This article describes the notebooks as both an archive and a thought diary, aiming to decipher some aspects of the materials’ texture.