How a “Dream Team” of Rescuers Salvaged Masses of Jewish Cultural Treasures Looted by the Nazis

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the U.S. and Allied armies deployed a team, popularly known as the Monuments Men, to locate and restore to their rightful owners huge caches of European art and cultural works that had been looted by the Nazis or, in some few cases, successfully hidden away for safeguarding.

Less well known is that this group was also assigned to salvage the material artifacts that had survived the Nazi destruction of European Jewish culture in particular: nearly three million books, manuscripts, art works, archives, Torah scrolls, ritual objects, historical records, letters, and other documents, some of them centuries old. Taken together, these formed a detailed tapestry of the history of millions of now lost Jewish lives.

But though these Jewish shards had been recovered, their former owners and heirs were mostly dead, and those who had survived were either in displaced-persons camps or had left for new lives elsewhere. To whom, then, should, could, or would these material remains of European Jewish civilization be returned?