Gustav Abb

Who was Gustav Abb?

Gustav Abb was a German librarian and Nazi.

Gustav Abb received his doctorate in 1911 from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, now known as the Humboldt University of Berlin. His thesis was written on the history of the Chorin Cloisters in Brandenburg.

From 1921 to 1925 he was Chairman of the Prussian Library Affairs Advisory Council. In 1923 he became library director of the Prussian State Library.

He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and in 1935 he became director of the University Library in Berlin.

From 1937 he was chairman of the Association of German Librarians. In the year after the Anschluss, on 30 May 1939 he declared in the opening speech at the annual meeting of the VDB in Graz, paying homage to Adolf Hitler, he praised him as the creator and expander of the German Reich.

During World War II, Abb was given the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer and deployed in July 1940 as head of the central administration of the libraries in occupied Poland. He was also a member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. After the German attack and invasion on the Soviet Union in 1941, he was made commissioner for the protection of libraries in the ERR.