How Librarian Spies Helped Win World War II 📚

VOA, Voice of America, Dec. 27, 2023.

- Photo caption: Library of Congress European Mission, 1946. Reuben Peiss is in the center, with a pipe. Harry Lydenberg, former director of the NY Public Library is 2nd from right. -- All About America explores American culture, politics, trends, history, ideals and places of interest.
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Librarians-turned-spies helped fight the Nazis by deploying their information gathering and organizing skills as weapons during World War II. These secret agents collected everything from local newspapers and trade journals to underground resistance pamphlets, technological manuals, economic reports and land surveys. “They weren't the James Bond type of spy but more of the low key, under-the-radar spy,” says Kathy Peiss, author of “Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe.”

"They were there to collect what today we would call open-source materials. So magazines, newspapers, materials like industrial directories, and anything that might give some insight into the planning and strength of the enemy.” The Offenbach Archival Depot, where books, manuscripts and archival materials taken by the Nazis during World War II were sorted and returned to their country of origin or maintained in new collections, 1946.

The librarians possessed skills that made them well-suited for the job. “Librarians, and specifically research librarians, are taught to be managers of information,” says Katie McBride Moench, a library media specialist who has researched these librarian field agents. “It is not so much like these librarians were trying to steer the course of the war… they were trying to take the information that was coming out of these occupied territories and organize it in a way that would be useful to military commanders and other people involved in making those decisions.”

Peiss, a retired professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in the topic after learning that her father’s eldest brother was one of these spies. Reuben Peiss, a Harvard Univ. librarian, was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services — the 1st U.S. intelligence agency — at the start of World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Like many of the librarians and academics recruited for the war effort, Peiss spoke several languages.. “Nobody suspects librarians of doing anything threatening, so they make really good intelligence agents. They're kind of hidden in plain sight.”...
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