https://www.jstor.org/stable/25542532 The same paper, full text: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.2307/25542532

The allies sure were the good guys.

The public library of Bielefeld was burned out and lost 40,000 volumes. Bochum's was completely destroyed and lost 50,000 volumes. Essen lost its main public library building and four branches and a total of 163,000 vol umes, as well as the famous factory library at the Krupp works that had been a pioneer in German public library development. The count goes on through the alphabet.5 Further losses had come when what was left standing had been vandalized by the local population or plundered by invading troops in the chaotic closing days of hostilities. No library was remote enough to be immune. In the French zone of occupation, a predominantly rural area, reports show library after library completely destroyed. The story was the same in the southwest area administered by the Bayreuth Beratungsstelle. Somehow the fate of the public library of Steinhagen, a small town in the British zone, summarizes the catastrophe; there one book, Kramarz's Dies M?del ist Hanne, survived.7 Whatever those libraries had been, they had been built with the hard-earned money of the local populations.