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Mission to Moscow
Mission to Moscow: The
Mystery of the “Lost Papers” of Ludwig von Mises
By Richard M. Ebeling
The following is abridged from a speech
delivered at “Evenings at FEE” in June 2004.
Ludwig von Mises was one of the most
important free-market economists and philosophers of freedom in our time. Born
in Lemberg in 1881, in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, his professional
career spanned the first seven decades of the 20th century. In two dozen books
and hundreds of articles and speeches, he shattered every one of the
prevailing collectivist dreams and statist delusions.
Mises proved that socialist central planning was
bound to fail at a time when the false ideal of social engineering was near
its zenith. He showed how and why interventionist policies and the welfare
state undermine men’s freedom, prosperity, and morality. He explained that
government control and mismanagement of the monetary and banking system cause
inflations and depressions. He irrefutably demonstrated that only a
free-market economy can protect individual liberty, assure rising standards of
living, bring about entrepreneurial innovation and successfully coordinate a
world of never-ending change.
Intellectual Powerhouse of Freedom
In the Austria of the 1920s and early 1930s, Mises was
the intellectual powerhouse of freedom. As a senior economic analyst for the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce, he tried to hold back the tidal wave of
interventionist and socialist legislation being implemented by the Austrian
parliament. At the University of Vienna he taught a popular and well-attended
seminar every semester. At his Chamber of Commerce office and at his home he
organized a “private seminar,” bringing together many of the best young
minds in Vienna for discussions of the social, economic, and philosophic
issues of the day. In 1926, he founded the Austrian Institute for Business
Cycle Research, with a young Friedrich A. Hayek as the first director.
Both fascists and communists hated him. After all,
as a leading intellectual opponent of all forms of collectivism, he had
systematically pointed out all the fallacies in their evil utopian fantasies.
When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, Mises realized that the
political and economic future of Austria was bleak. As an uncompromising
classical liberal and a Jew, he knew that the inevitable Nazi takeover of
Austria would threaten not only his work but his life as well. In 1934, Ludwig
von Mises accepted an invitation to become a professor of international
economic relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in
Geneva, Switzerland, and left Austria.
The Nazi Looting and Soviet Capture of Mises’ Papers
After his mother’s death in early 1937, Mises returned
his Vienna apartment at 24 Wollseile, District III, to the landlord, but
sublet what had been his room from the new tenants. There he stored his family
and personal items, his voluminous correspondence with many of the great
thinkers of his time, his manuscripts and unpublished papers, his professional
and military documents (he had served in the Austrian Army in World War I, and
had been three times decorated for bravery under fire on the Eastern Front),
materials relating to his university teaching, and private seminar, as well as
a significant portion of his large library.
On March 12, 1938, the German Army marched into
Austria, and Mises’ homeland was absorbed into Hitler’s Greater German
Reich. Within a few days, the Gestapo came looking for Mises at his Vienna
apartment. He was safe in Switzerland, but the Nazis boxed up and hauled away
all of his possessions. He had friends intercede on his behalf in a futile
attempt to get his papers and family items back, but the Gestapo insisted that
everything was “misplaced.” Until his death in New York in 1973, Mises
believed that all of his property had been destroyed, either by the Nazis or
in the cauldron of violence in the Second World War.
But in fact his papers had not been destroyed. They
had been preserved by the Nazis and were eventually stored in a small town in
western Bohemia in Czechoslovakia, along with millions of other documents
looted by the Nazis from private individuals and governments as the Wehrmacht
occupied one country after another in the turmoil of the war.
In May of 1945, Bohemia was “liberated” by the
Soviet Army. In a train station the soldiers discovered 24 railway boxcars
prepared for evacuation. Stuffed inside were papers and nothing else. After
the NKVD – later renamed the KGB – arrived on the scene, they rapidly
surveyed what was there and realized that they had discovered a treasure.
Stalin was immediately informed, and he ordered the boxcars to be brought to
Moscow. A deceptively undistinguished building was quickly constructed to
secretly archive more than 20 million pages of captured documents, from 20
formerly Nazi-occupied countries. And there the papers remained, in Moscow,
organized and cared for by KGB archivists for almost half a century. Only the
Soviet secret police and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs had access to
this secret archive.
In one of the great ironies of history, the papers of
Ludwig von Mises, the foremost intellectual opponent of socialism in the 20th
century, ended up in the tender care of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union!
On the Trail of Mises’ “Lost Papers”
I first heard that Mises’ “lost papers” might have
survived the war in the summer of 1993. My wife, Anna, and I were in Vienna
doing archival research on Mises. A friend of mine in the Austrian Chamber of
Labor mentioned that some German diplomats had recently been to Moscow looking
for material about anti-fascist Germans from before the Second World War. In
one of the archival indexes they came across a reference to Ludwig Mises, but
because he was an Austrian, not a German, they did not pursue the matter
further.
 In
spite of countless efforts we were unable to track down any additional
information. In summer 1996 we made a trip to the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, D. C., to see if, by chance, any Gestapo file on Mises might have
survived the war. But researchers at the museum were not able to find any
record of such a file in their database. “What about Moscow?” I asked,
“Might there be anything related to Mises in Moscow?”
We were then introduced to Karl Modek, the museum
staff member responsible for researching the Holocaust in the former Soviet
Union. He told us that a formerly secret Soviet archive, containing foreign
papers and document collections captured during the war, had recently been
declassified and was now available to researchers. The name of the archive was
the Center for Historical and Documental Collections. In fact he had just
received an index to the archive’s collection. He began to turn the pages of
the index. One page after another, and . . . there it was! Printed on the list
of collections was “Fund #623” with the name “Ludwig Mises” next to
it. And nothing else.
At the time, I was the Ludwig von Mises Professor
of Economics at Hillsdale College. When we returned to the campus, I told Dr.
George Roche, what we might have found. Dr. Roche, before being named the
president of the College in 1971, served as the Director of Programs and
Seminars at FEE and had known Mises rather well and admired him greatly. He
immediately arranged the funding for my wife and me to travel to Moscow and to
the formerly secret archive housing the “lost papers of Ludwig von Mises.”
Our Mission to Moscow and the Secret Archive
My Russian-born wife, Anna, arranged the paperwork and
the visas for the trip to Russia. One of her friends in a prominent position
in the Russian Academy of Sciences arranged for our access to the archive, and
on October 17, 1996, we arrived in Moscow. For the next ten days we
meticulously went through the whole multilingual collection of Mises’
papers. The KGB archivists had carefully catalogued and arranged his papers
into 196 separate files—totaling over 10,000 pages of material.
 Neither
the director of the archive nor any member of his staff understood the
importance of those documents. They kept asking us, why Mises? Nobody has ever
shown any interest in him! Why not the diary of Hitler’s Minister of
Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, or letters of Albert Einstein and manuscripts of
Immanuel Kant? What about original scores by Mozart? They even offered us the
entire archive of the French secret police that the Nazis had captured when
they occupied Paris in June 1940. But all we wanted was Ludwig von Mises.
In fact, we were the first Westerners to request
and to actually look through Mises’ papers. The archive’s director at the
time, Dr. Mansur Mukhamedjanov, said in his speech at Hillsdale College in
March 1997: “The Ludwig von Mises Fund was accessible to researchers for
several years. But from the time when the archive was declassified, not one
researcher showed interest, looked into or worked with the materials of this
fund.. . . Foreign researchers were interested in anything but Mises. Some of
them probably saw the index and knew that such a fund existed. . . . But our
careful records show that no researchers ever requested ‘Fund 623 – Ludwig
Mises’ until Richard and Anna Ebeling.”
We came back to the United States with over 8,000
pages of photocopies from Mises’ collection. Shortly after our return,
Liberty Fund of Indianapolis contacted me and expressed an interest in
arranging for the translation and publication of a large selection of the
“Lost Papers.” Two of three volumes in the series have already been
published, with the last volume nearing completion, under the general title Selected
Writings of Ludwig von Mises.
The Legacy of the “Lost Papers” of Ludwig von Mises
These thousands of pages of archival material, bring to
light a new side of Ludwig von Mises. Here we see Mises as more than just the
brilliant economic theorist demonstrating the unworkability of socialist
central planning and the inherent contradictions of the interventionist state,
or as the grand expositor of a universal theory of human action and the market
process.
We see Mises as serious and methodical policy
analyst in the twenty years between the two World Wars – one who explains
how to save a society facing a hyperinflation by introducing an alternative
currency in place of the debased government money; how to bring an economy out
of a great depression; how to rein in an interventionist bureaucracy that is
strangling a market economy; how to end foreign exchange controls that are
distorting and hindering international trade; or how to construct a fiscal
policy so it no longer stifles investment and capital formation.
In other words, the discovery of the “lost
papers” of Ludwig von Mises lifts the veil from the life and work of this
great free-market economist and advocate of liberty. Through these thousands
of pages Mises emerges as even more influential and important than any of his
strongest admirers have imagined.
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