The books that constitute the Hitler Library were discovered in a salt mine near Berchtesgadenhaphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on themby soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division in the spring of 1945. After a lengthy initial evaluation at the U. S. military "collecting point" in Munich the books, numbering 3,000, were shipped to the United States and transferred in January of 1952 to the Library of Congress, where an intern was assigned to uncrate the collection. "The intern did what we call 'duping out,'" says David Moore, a German-acquisition assistant at the Library of Congress. "If a book was not one hundred percent sure, if there was no bookplate, no inscription to the Fhrer, he didn't keep it." According to Moore, duplicate copies were sent to the exchange-and-gift division and then either went to other libraries or found their way onto the open market; the non-duplicate books that could not be fully authenticated were absorbed into the Library of Congress's general collection.