The Three Cultures Foundation presents ‘The lost library: a reflection on the literary plundering committed by the Nazis during the Second World War’
The Three Cultures Foundation joins, once again, the commemoration of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, established on 27 January by the General Assembly of the United Nations in memory of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on the same day in 1945.
On Wednesday 29 January, the Three Cultures Foundation will hold the conference ‘The lost library: a reflection on the literary plundering committed by the Nazis during the Second World War’. The talk will be given by the writer Benito Olmo, author of the novel Tinta y fuego (Ink and Fire), the result of research into the literary plundering committed by the Nazis, who were responsible for the theft of hundreds of libraries during the Second World War.
As the author himself explains, despite being one of the least known events in contemporary history, there is evidence that the German army, through a department headed by Alfred Rosenberg, plundered the most important communist and Jewish libraries in Europe in a desperate attempt to destroy their enemies by stealing their identity. Many of these books remain unaccounted for. In Berlin's Central Library there is a department responsible for locating books stolen by the Nazis, identifying their rightful owners and returning them, or their heirs, to them.
With this research, Olmo demonstrates the extent of the totalitarian barbarity carried out by Nazism, which not only aimed at the physical destruction of those it considered inferior, such as Jews, gypsies, political dissidents and the disabled, among others, but also at their cultural and identity disappearance, for which they tried to erase their history and literary memory by destroying or plundering their books.
About the speaker, Benito Olmo
Writer. Cádiz (1980). His novels include Tinta y fuego, La maniobra de la tortuga -adapted to film by Juan Miguel del Castillo-; and El Gran Rojo, winner of the Novelpol Prize for the best crime novel published in 2021. He has also published Los Días Felices and the audio series Desajuste de cuentas and Wonderland. He has been a finalist for the 2019 Cartagena Negra Prize, the III Santa Cruz Prize, the I Aragón Negro Prize and the Tormo Negro Masfarné Prize, among others. He has given talks at universities, institutions and literary festivals such as Getafe Negro, BCNegra, AlicanteNoir.
