Gosfond

Gosfond (Russian: Госфонд, lit. State Fund) was a Soviet Trophy Brigade otherwise known as the State Agency for Literature formed in late 1944 by Georgy Malenkov on Stalin's orders. It was one of a number of war committees formed by the Soviet Union during the Vistula–Oder Offensive and tasked with appropriating foreign factories, manufactured goods, raw materials, livestock, farm machinery, fertilizer, crops, laboratories, libraries, museums, scientific archives from all of Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, and forcible relocations of (mostly German) engineers and scientists. The literature confiscated by Gosfond was transported to Soviet state libraries and cultural institutions including the National Lenin Library of the USSR, the National Historical Library, the National Polytechnical Library, the National Library for Foreign Literature and the National Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library.^[1]

Rebuilding Berlin Staatsbibliothek Library, books in storage, 1949

Most looted documents and books, sent to the Soviet Union by Gosfond, were stored haphazardly, seldom catalogued often destroyed by neglect and inattention. Items of scientific value were piled up in smaller public libraries and agricultural stations, where the books were never catalogued and could not be recalled for any useful activities. The origins of foreign acquisitions including the 1946 Gosfond delivery of 1,857 crates of books to libraries in Moscow were carefully concealed from librarians as well as the general public.^[1]

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