Librarians-turned-spies helped fight the Nazis by deploying their information gathering and organizing skills as weapons during World War II.
These secret agents collected everything from local newspapers and trade journals to underground resistance pamphlets, technological manuals, economic reports and land surveys.
“They weren't the James Bond type of spy but more of the low key, under-the-radar spy,” says Kathy Peiss, author of “Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe .”
"They were there to collect what today we would call open-source materials. So magazines, newspapers, materials like industrial directories, and anything that might give some insight into the planning and strength of the enemy.”
The librarians possessed skills that made them well-suited for the job.
“Librarians, and specifically research librarians, are taught to be managers of information,” says Katie McBride Moench, a library media specialist who has researched these librarian field agents.
“It is not so much like these librarians were trying to steer the course of the war… they were trying to take the information that was coming out of these occupied territories and organize it in a way that would be useful to military commanders and other people involved in making those decisions.”
Peiss, a retired professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in the topic after learning that her father's eldest brother was one of these spies.
Reuben Peiss, a Harvard University librarian, was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services — the first U.S. intelligence agency — at the start of World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Like many of the librarians and academics recruited for the war effort, Peiss spoke several languages.
“My uncle Ruben Peiss knew German, French, Italian. I have picked up Portuguese instantly. …So, being able to look at a newspaper or a magazine or a book and know what it is saying was extremely important, and to be able to make a quick judgment about that,” Peiss says. “Nobody suspects librarians of doing anything threatening, so they make really good intelligence agents. “They're kind of hidden in plain sight.”