Analytical note of F.-J. Starke in context of Nazi library policy in Ukraine during World War II

Purpose. The main purpose of this documentary publication is to introduce to a scientific community a previously unknown World War II document with the topic of the library policy in the occupied territory of the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and to analyze it as a historical source that can supplement already known information and add new knowledge on the role of libraries in a Nazi cultural policy in Ukraine during the Second World War, Nazi plans for book collections, personnel policy, and the importance of libraries for Nazi propaganda. Methodology. The methodology of research is comprised of the historical-archival and historical-comparative research methods, as well as methods of source analysis. Document's authorship, time, purpose, circumstances of its creation, its informational potential, and its place in an archival complex of similar documents of German occupation services involved in the determination of the fate of libraries, and its place in the documentary collections created by Nazi structures in the occupied territory of the USSR, as well as the potential of using this document in further historical research makes it possible to consider the document a historical resource. Scientific novelty of the research. The object of this study is the document "On the importance of libraries" created by the employee of the Sonderstab Bibliothekswesen (Special Staff “Library Science”) by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce or ERR) Fritz-Joachim Starke in occupied Ukraine in May 1942, which hadn't been introduced to historians yet. But unlike other documents, this document covered not the state of libraries and the fate of their collections, but the Nazi vision of local libraries as part of the occupation policy. Conclusion. The analysis of this document in an archival complex of similar documents for the topic of the Nazi library policy in the occupied territory of the USSR shows us that German employees perceived local libraries not only as a place of the concentration of printed materials needed for public administration, or as a place of storage of valuable collections, but as institutions that would support the German authorities. At the same time, the document reflects the perception of libraries by the occupiers as an additional resource, especially in the development of the economic and scientific potential of the occupied territories, for example, in the organization of local production and training of local employees.