On the eve of war in 1939, Dorothy Reeder and her volunteer team laid sandbags on the top floor of The American Library in Paris and pasted strips of brown paper on the windows to protect themselves against falling glass from bomb blasts.

“We had no idea of closing. Each member of the staff was notified to go and was told that whatever they decided was right. They all stayed,” Reeder said at the time. 

Two days later, Reeder started the library’s Soldiers’ Service to distribute books to French and English fighters and later organized an underground network to smuggle literature to Jewish readers who were banned from entering libraries by France’s Nazi occupiers.

Reeder saw the American Library as a window to the free world. “No other thing possesses that mystical faculty to make people see with other people’s eyes,” she said. “The library is a bridge of books between cultures.”

Crucially, it also provided a much-needed boost to the morale of Allied soldiers in the dark days to come.

How to mobilize a wartime library 

Dorothy Reeder wasn’t formally trained as an intelligence operative but she had a razor-sharp mind and steely determination. She started her career at Washington’s Library of Congress and worked her way up to become director of the American Library in Paris by 1937, the largest English-language lending library on the European continent.

Through the Soldiers’ Service she set up, Dorothy’s team shipped more than 100,000 books to British and French fighters in the early years of the war. Library volunteers carefully turned each donated volume upside down and shook them to ensure no propaganda was hiding between the pages before bundling the books into care packages. 

Reeder’s volunteers also wrangled special passes from the French military so they could visit the Maginot Line and other forbidden zones to surreptitiously drop parcels.

Paris is closed

As German soldiers drew closer to France’s capital in 1940, Dorothy sent most of her team to Angoulême, west of Paris, and remained at the library waiting for the inevitable.

“Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th, and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked, and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard,” Dorothy wrote in a confidential report to the American Library Association.

After the fall of Paris on June 14, 1940, the American Library carried on under Nazi regulations as a ‘neutral’ institution in an occupied country. Reeder soon organized the Red Cross, YMCA, and Quaker organizations to deliver books to PoWs and leveraged her relationship with Dr. Hermann Fuchs, head of the Bibliotheksschutz, the German agency responsible for overseeing libraries in occupied territories. 

“Dr. Fuchs became a key player in this drama and it is quite likely that the American Library could not have survived without his protection,” according to UCLA Professor Emerita Mary Niles Maack.

‍

‍

‍

Life under Nazi occupation

After the German occupation, Jewish patrons were stripped of their right to work in many professions and banned from Parisian parks and libraries.

In quiet protest, Reeder boldly set up a clandestine network to hand-deliver books to her former Jewish patrons and book lovers.

She also worked voluntarily as the US Embassy representative at a hotel used as an emergency residence for American expats and ambulance drivers in Paris. She’d previously worked with the government’s propaganda team, broadcast messages from Paris back to the US, and was an informal link between America, the Embassy in Paris, and the six high-ranking Army representatives from France, the US, and Britain who sat on the library’s Honorary Committee. 

The American Library soon became a hub for expats and French volunteers. “Nine rue de Teheran was not only a Library in those days, it was a rendezvous for all doing charitable work, for friends to meet and discuss the prevailing situation, and for others to tell you of their loved ones far from home. It was in fact, a meeting place of goodwill, good humor, and understanding,” Reeder wrote to her US colleagues.

The bonhomie would not last. The US had been providing significant military supplies to the Allies for at least a year before it entered the war in 1941. Reluctantly, Dorothy Reeder decided it was time to set sail for home. Before leaving Paris, she ensured that most of the Soldiers’ Service files were burned so they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
‍

‍

The American Library in Paris

In Dorothy’s absence, another American stepped up. Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, who was married to a French Count, had served on the library board as a trustee alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edith Wharton. The Ohio-born Countess arranged for the library to be put under the administration of a French cultural organization. Against all odds, the Countess and her small, dedicated team kept the American Library operational throughout WWII. 

Dorothy Reeder, meanwhile, arrived home safely in the US in July, 1941. She was appointed a special advisor to Bogotá, Colombia where she organized the country’s first free lending library and later served the American Red Cross in Europe, setting up clubs for American soldiers. Dorthy returned to the Library of Congress before her death in 1957.

In 2020, The American Library in Paris celebrated its 100th anniversary, its motto: Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux. After the darkness of war, the light of books.