JF Ptak Science Books Post 2640
Here's an uncommon book, referenced in a very obscure publication, written by a politician and operative whose time had come and gone, and from a library that did not exist to the public. Andre Marty's Pour liberer le Patrie des Armes our la France, Confiance en le peuple. ("For the Liberation of the Homeland, ARMS for France/Have Trust in its People") is a small publication made from an address made by him on 25 July 1944, one month exactly before the liberation of Paris. It was incendiary and was not of course printed in Nazi-occupied France; rather it was printed at Editions Liberte, in the still-safe Algiers. Marty (1886-1956) was a long-time member and leading official of the French Communist Party, and at the time of this writing he had been sent to Algeria from the Soviet Union, where he had been working directly with the Comintern since 1939. Marty returned to France soon after the liberation of Paris where he attempted a revolution or some such thing, trying to take advantage of the chaos and confusion of the newly-forming French government.
In the back of the short pamphlet there was an advertisement among the ads for a provocatively-titled book, Le Martyrs des Antifascistes dans les Camps de Concentration de l'Afrique du Nord. It is unusual first of all because it is about a concentration camp and there was still nearly a year left of WWII; secondly, although I cannot find a copy of it online, I assume that the camp is a Vichy camp, set up to contain and work and kill Jews, anti-fascists, and other perceived enemies of Vichy France and Germany. More so than the present pamphlet, this is what would make for good reading. Also, this ad sits among a number of others that refer to the coming liberation of Algeria from France--something that would not happen until the end of a complicated and awful war of liberation fought from 1954 to 1962. The Vietnamese operated under the same assumption, that the end of the war would bring about their freedom, too, from the French--the French would be done there in another nine years, replaced by the U.S., and then another 30 years of war. The end of WWII brought with it high clarity and deep complexities, with thousands of varied decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. August 1945-August 1946 was a very involved and potentially dangerous year, full of joy, relief, desperation, hope, hunger, revenge, gratitude, homelessness, and so on.
The last bit on this unusual pamphlet--my copy comes from the Library of Congress, having been sent there from the library of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which was the direct predecessor of the C.I.A., the library holding things classified and not, though it was not for the use of the general population. According to the WorldCat/OCLC, there are no copies of this in libraries in North and South America, with only three copies located institutionally in Europe.
Using a simple search on WorldCat for the period 1930-1938 there seem to be about 33 distinct and different titles using “concentration camp” in the title or having “concentration camp” as a keyword—so, not all that many; not unknown, of course, but still, not too many. There's about an equal distribution between German/Soviet concentration camps, with Spain and Cyprus making appearances. A quick look for 1940-1944 shows 103 titles, 90+ of them being distinct and separate. Beyond 1944 the data on WorldCat gets a little tricky to use in such a quick way as I have been using it—the numbers get bigger and the classifications grow wider, so I really can't offhandedly say how many books were published in, say, 1945/6 using the previously-mentioned criteria. This at least gives some idea of the relative opacity of the topic within a restricted parameter.
Some of the interesting titles from the early period include:
The Sonnenburg Concentration Camp. New York City: Workers International Relief and the International Labor Defense, 1934.
Chernavin "Life in Concentration Camps in USSR." The Slavonic and East European Review12.35 (1934): 387-408.
Appalling Facts. Letters from German Concentration Camps.Martin Lawrence: London, 1935
Niemöller, Martin, and A. S. Duncan-Jones. From U-Boat to Concentration Camp : The Autobiography of M. Niemöller.London, 1936.
Nazi Germany : Its Concentration Camps, Penitentiaries and Jails.New York: Labor Chest, 1938
Note:
Being part of the OSS library the Marty pamphlet has a borrower's card in a slip on the rear cover, and it shows that it was borrowed "indefinitely" by Henry B. Hill, 1907-1990, "...professor of history, University of Kansas, who developed British history there and later at Wisconsin".--Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 by Robin W. Winks (New York: William Morrow, 1987), pp. 495-97. I have about 50 or so of these former OSS Library pamphlets, and they almost all have these call slips, and they almost all have been borrowed at one time or another. And for those names I could find they all had gone on to interesting lives.
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