With the onset of World War II, the most precious holdings of the State Library were dispersed to 18 castles and offices, away from any possible military objectives. Consequently, they largely survived the bombing raids of February and March 1945 which destroyed the former library buildings and virtually the whole historic center of Dresden — with losses of about 200,000 volumes of twentieth-century manuscript and printed holdings and also some irreplaceable musical manuscripts. The losses include the major "corpus" of Tomaso Albinoni's unpublished music, though Georg Philipp Telemann's manuscripts were preserved (catalogued, 1983). The library's copy of "Sachsenspiegel", considered one of the most important manuscripts due to its historic significance in law and its illustrative quality, suffered from water damage. It underwent a restoration in the 1990s. After the war, some 250,000 books were taken to the Soviet Union.