{"id":2958,"date":"2019-03-19T17:40:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T17:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/?p=2958"},"modified":"2024-06-04T18:30:33","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T18:30:33","slug":"the-nypl-librarian-who-spied-on-the-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/2019\/03\/19\/the-nypl-librarian-who-spied-on-the-nazis\/","title":{"rendered":"The NYPL Librarian Who Spied on the Nazis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of Florence Mendheim, from the Leo Baeck Institution<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The NYPL Librarian Who Spied on the Nazis<\/h2>\n

Florence Mendheim was a Jewish librarian for the New York Public Library, and in 1933 she went undercover to spy on Nazi-associated groups in the United States. Her collection, featuring a large amount of antisemitic propaganda, is held by the Leo Baeck Institute<\/a>, and is an invaluable window into the spread of fascist propaganda in America leading up to World War II.<\/p>\n

Florence, the daughter of German Jewish immigrants, was born in Illinois in 1899, but raised in New York where she spent the rest of her life. It\u2019s unknown why exactly she decided to surveil these Nazi groups, but some of the material collected is quite rare, and it wouldn\u2019t have been saved without Florence\u2019s undercover work.<\/p>\n

Sometime around 1933, she began surveilling the Nazi-associated group \u201cFriends of the New Germany.\u201d She reported her activities to Rabbi Jacob Xenab Cohen, who was connected with both the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and the American Jewish Congress, but the full extent of this project is not entirely clear. In the course of this undertaking, Florence used at least three pseudonyms: KQX (for correspondence with the Rabbi), Gertrude Mueller (for the Nazis), and Anna Hitler (in order to contact potential family members of Adolf Hitler living in the United States).<\/p>\n

The saved collection of propaganda shows a variety of rhetoric, from outright and blatant antisemitism and racism to dog-whistles with coded implications, such as the vilification of \u201ccommunism\u201d and showing nationalist pride to Germany.<\/p>\n

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