Ludwig von Mises was the most important free-market economist and philosopher of liberty of the 20th century. Born in 1881 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, his professional career spanned the first seven decades of our century. In two dozen books and hundreds of articles, he shattered every one of the collectivist dreams and statist delusions of our time. He proved that socialist central planning was bound to fail; that interventionist policies and welfare-statist programs would undermine freedom and prosperity; and that government control and mismanagement of the monetary and banking system was the cause of inflations and depressions. And he clearly and irrefutably demonstrated that only a free, unregulated market economy could protect individual liberty, assure rising standards of living, and bring about smooth coordination of a multitude of supplies and demands in a world of entrepreneurial innovation and never-ending change.
For challenging the collectivisms of our century, Ludwig von Mises became a leading intellectual enemy of the statists around the world. Fascists and communists hated him for his destruction of their evil utopian fantasies. Interventionist-welfare statists tried to ignore him and his refutations of their schemes for manipulating men and markets and forcibly redistributing wealth.
In the Austria of the 1920s and early 1930s, Mises was the intellectual powerhouse of freedom. As a senior economic analyst for the Austrian 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 each semester. He organized a "private seminar" at his Chamber of Commerce offices, bringing together many of the best young minds in Vienna for important discussions on both economic theory and method and the consequences of various types of economic policy. In 1926, he founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, with a young Friedrich A. Hayek as the first director.
But with the rising tide of Nazism in Germany, Mises realized that the political and economic future of Austria was increasingly uncertain. Because he was an uncompromising classical liberal and an Austrian Jew, a Nazi takeover of Austria would threaten not only his professional work but his life as well. So, in March 1934, he accepted an invitation from William Rappard, director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, to take up a position as Professor of International Economic Relations. In October 1934, Mises moved to Geneva.
But Mises kept his apartment at 24 Wollzeile, District III, in Vienna. His mother continued living there until her death at the end of 1937. Shortly after the Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938, the Gestapo entered the apartment and removed the contents.
From his residence in Geneva, Mises mailed out, on March 9, 1939, an "Information" to his friends in Europe that the Gestapo had carted off the contents of the apartment. He explained that he had lost his library, his personal and family documents, correspondence, files, papers, and manuscripts. When friends of Mises still in Vienna attempted to intercede on his behalf to get his papers and personal property back, the Gestapo claimed that they could not be found. They were never seen again. In the years following World War II, Mises and his friends assumed that they had been destroyed, either by the Nazis or in the destruction of war.
But, in fact, his papers had not been destroyed.
I first heard about the possibility that Mises's stolen papers had survived the war in the summer of 1993. My wife Anna and I were in Vienna on a research trip looking for material for an intellectual biography of Ludwig von Mises, which I am now in the process of writing. We were told by a friend of mine in the Austrian Chamber of Labor that two German diplomats had been in Moscow, Russia, in 1992, looking for material about antifascist Germans of the 1930s. Though they had no interest in any material relating to Austria, they had seen a reference to Ludwig von Mises. This suggested that, in fact, material relating to Mises may have ended up in Moscow.
In the summer of 1994, my wife and I were at Stanford University, again looking for material about Mises among the papers of Friedrich A. Hayek and Fritz Machlup, which are stored at the Hoover Institution. It was there that we found a copy of Mises's "Information" notice about the Nazi seizure of his papers and their contents.
But it was not until last year that we actually found out about the location of Mises's papers in Moscow. While on a business trip to Washington, D.C., in July 1996, we went to the Holocaust Museum. We asked if they might be able to locate for us a Gestapo file on Mises. Since the Nazis had come looking for Mises once they occupied Austria, we figured that they must have had a dossier on him. But the researchers at the Holocaust Museum were not able to track down the location of any such file in their vast computerized research library.
I then asked if they had a way of finding out if there was any material relating to Mises in Russia. One of the senior researchers, Karl Modek, had a large binder listing the various historical archives in Moscow. He gave us a photocopy of a page describing the Center for Historical and Documental Collections in Moscow, including the address, telephone and fax numbers, and the types of archival papers deposited there. Then he turned to another page in the same binder. There it was! "Fund" #623 with the name "Ludwig von Mises." And nothing else.
Returning to Hillsdale College, I informed the college president, Dr. George Roche, about the information we had acquired in Washington. He immediately appreciated the historical and intellectual significance of the find and said everything possible must be done to pursue this important discovery. In September, the College's development office arranged the required funding for a trip to Moscow through the generous assistance of friends of Hillsdale College.
My wife, who is Russian-born, arranged the paperwork for visas to Russia. And one of her friends in a prominent position in Moscow contacted the director of the Center for Historical and Documental Collections on our behalf.
On October 17, 1996, we landed in Moscow and until October 27, we spent every working day carefully going through the entire collection of Mises's lost papers. The director of the archive informed us that we were the first Western scholars who had ever expressed any interest in Mises's papers or who had requested or been given access to them. He, in fact, said that he was somewhat embarrassed to admit that until we brought it to their attention, neither he nor the other members of the archival staff had any idea who Ludwig von Mises was or of his importance in the history of the 20th century. Through the kind and generous assistance of the director and the deputy directors of the archive, we were able to arrange the photocopying and microfilming of virtually the entire collection of Mises's papers. These copies are now at Hillsdale College.
While in Moscow, we also found out the whole story of how Mises's papers had traveled from Nazi control to the heart of the communist empire. In May 1945, as the Second World War was coming to a close, the Soviet Army occupied Bohemia, the western region of Czechoslovakia. One of the towns occupied by Stalin's armed forces in Bohemia had served as a repository for records, files, and archives seized by the Gestapo in countries overrun by the Nazi regime. Among the tens of thousands of files, papers, and boxed-up archives the Nazis had stored away were those of Ludwig von Mises. During the months following the end of the war, Soviet military trains hauled everything found in this repository to the East-to Moscow. There, these captured documents-including those of Ludwig von Mises-were turned over to the KGB's special archives. Indeed, a special building was constructed to store and analyze the millions of pages of documents captured in Eastern Europe.
In one of the many ironies of history, the papers of the greatest intellectual opponent of socialism in the 20th century ended up in the tender care of the Soviet secret police! And they were, indeed, treated with care. On March 6, 1951, a stamp was placed on the "opus," or annotated index, to all of Mises's papers, indicating they had been read, arranged, and organized, with a brief paragraph summarizing each of the topic sections in the "Mises Fund." This "Fund" contained 196 separate files, with many of them running into the hundreds of pages. Indeed, the entire "Mises Fund" contained over 10,000 items.
Ludwig von Mises died in New York in 1973, having become an American citizen, never knowing that the ideological heirs of Karl Marx in Moscow had done everything possible to assure that his lost papers were in proper and protected order.
Mises kept almost everything! Indeed, he seems to have been something of a compulsive "pack-rat." There were even the smallest of things-for example, train ticket stubs from a journey to some conference and the receipts from meals eaten at hotels on some lecture trips.
There were several folders about his activities during the First World War as an officer with an artillery regiment on the Russian front, including two old film negatives from which we had prints made. These eighty-year-old photos were of Mises with members of his artillery regiment somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine.
In 1918, he was transferred to the Austrian General Staff in Vienna. We found copies of various Austrian government documents about the monetary and fiscal problems of the war. Among the documents were several papers and monographs written by Mises for the Austrian General Staff about the wartime inflation, about fiscal and exchange-rate problems in wartime, and on the problems of national minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was also a monograph about the economic relationships between Austria-Hungry and the Ukraine.
There were hundreds of letters and postcards written to him by his mother while he was at the front. His mother wrote tender words of support, told about family members and friends, and described the situation on the home front in Vienna. There were also a few postcards from his brother Richard, a famous mathematician who later became a professor at Harvard University.
We also found the course outlines of the seminars he taught at the University of Vienna. They cover a variety of topics on economic theory and policy. There were, as well, typed summaries prepared by students of his lectures and the class discussions.
There were documents about the private seminar he held at his Chamber of Commerce office. He kept lists of the attendees each year and some of the topics discussed. But there were also the typed full texts of some papers delivered at the private seminar, devoted to the methodology of the social sciences, including the papers delivered by Mises himself and other famous economists.
Mises had kept some of the papers relating to his work at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, including memoranda and reports he had prepared on the monetary and financial problems in Austria during the Great Depression.
He also preserved a large portion of his correspondence. Mises not only kept many of the letters he received, he also kept carbon copies of his replies, so the correspondence is complete. Mises was almost always businesslike. The letters are frequently a continuation of economic-policy debates, e.g., about the monetary causes of the great Austrian inflation of the early 1920s, the problems of interventionism, and the unworkability of socialism. Among the letters were Mises's correspondence with his fellow Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who had moved to England in 1931, and with Lionel Robbins, who at the time was a leading expositor of Austrian Economics at the London School of Economics.
Mises took a keen and concerned interest in his students and scholar-friends. There were letters of recommendation, for example, in which Mises tried to get research grants or jobs outside of Austria for Gottfried Haberler (who later taught at Harvard University and became a leading figure on the theory of international trade) and several others who became prominent members of the economics profession. He had a very good relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation in this regard.
The correspondence also clearly demonstrates Mises's influence and high profile in the central Europe of the 1920s and early 1930s. There was a large number of letters from industrial and business organizations inviting him to join their associations and deliver lectures. Numerous research institutes, professional associations, universities, and the League of Nations invited him to participate in conferences or deliver a paper.
In the 1920s, Mises became a member of the Vienna Rotary Club. Besides the membership forms, rules and bylaws, and notices of meetings, there was in the file the words of a "friendship" song that members were expected to sing. One can just picture Ludwig von Mises as a vocalist at a Rotary Club luncheon!
Mises also kept copies of many of his articles, and he was extremely prolific. This refers not only to his scholarly articles and books, but to the large number of pieces he wrote for the Vienna newspapers and magazines on economic policy issues, with his contributions often being the lead article. (Several of them that we found are not included in Bettina Bien Greaves' excellent annotated bibliography of Mises's work.)
There were also some personal papers and letters that offer unique insights into the life of Mises, who always was an extremely private man. These lost papers of Ludwig von Mises lift a veil from the life and work of one of the leading figures of the 20th century. His papers, manuscripts, and correspondence not only further demonstrate Mises's importance as a great free-market economist, but they also show his widespread influence in the Europe of the period between the two world wars.
On March 9-13, 1997, Hillsdale College will be holding its annual Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series, this year on the topic of "Between Power and Liberty: Economics and the Law." In conjunction with the conference, Hillsdale College will be presenting an exhibition of a selection of the papers, documents, manuscripts, and correspondence found in Moscow, along with other material about his life and work in Austria and Switzerland, which I have collected over the last several years from archives in Vienna and Geneva.
And on May 22, 1997, I will be delivering a talk on the discovery and the content of Mises's lost papers at The Future of Freedom Foundation's Vienna Coffee Club in Fairfax, Virginia. I hope you will be able to join us.
Richard Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan and serves as vice president of academic affairs at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va.
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