Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves: The Search for the Hildebrandslied and the Willehalm Codex

In *Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves*, Opritsa Popa has documented what might justifiably be described as the most celebrated case of looting of two German cultural treasures by a member of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and their subsequent odyssey across both an ocean and a continent: the pilfering from a cellar in Bad Wildungen of the ninth-century *Liber Sapientiae*, containing the two leaves of the oldest extant German heroic poem, the Old High German *Hildebrandslied*, along with the fourteenth-century illuminated *Willehalm* codex, both of which had been removed from the State Library in Kassel for protection from bombing raids.