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A FEW
WORDS ABOUT ADOLF HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY (excerpts from the
book “Hitler’s Private Library” (2010) |
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PREFACE: The Man Who
Burned Books HE WAS, OF COURSE, a man known better for
burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died at age
fifty-six he owned an estimated sixteen thousand volumes. It was by any
measure an impressive collection: first editions of the works of
philosophers, historians, poets, playwrights and novelists. For him the
library represented a Pierian spring, that
metaphorical source of knowledge and inspiration. He drew deeply there,
quelling his intellectual insecurities and nourishing his fanatic ambitions.
He read voraciously, at least one book per night, sometimes more, so he
claimed. “When one gives one also has to take,” he once said, “and I take
what I need from books.” He ranked Don Quixote, along with Robinson
Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Gulliver's Travels, among the great
works of world literature. “Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself,” he
said. In Robinson Crusoe he
perceived “the development of the entire history of mankind." Don Quixote captured
“ingeniously" the end of an era. He owned illustrated editions of both
books and was especially impressed by Gustave
Dore's romantic depictions of Cervantes's delusion-plagued hero. He also owned the collected works of
William Shakespeare, pub¬lished in German
translation in 1925 by Georg Muller as part of a series intended to make
great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet,
and Troilus and Cressida. The
entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather with a gold-embossed
eagle flanked by his initials on the spine. He considered Shakespeare superior to
Goethe and Schiller… He was versed in the Holy Scriptures, and
owned a particularly handsome tome with Worte Christi, or Words of
Christ, embossed in gold on a cream-colored calfskin cover that even
today remains as smooth as silk. He also owned a German translation of Henry
Ford's anti-Semitic tract, The
International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, and a 1931 handbook on
poison gas with a chapter detailing the qualities and effects of prussic
acid, the homicidal asphyxiant marketed
commercially as Zyklon B. On his bedstand, he kept a well-thumbed copy of Wilhelm Busch's
mischievous cartoon duo Max and Moritz. WALTER BENJAMIN ONCE SAID that you could
tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps—his tastes, his interests, his habits. The books we retain and those we discard,
those we read as well as those we decide not to, all say something about who
we are. As a German-Jewish culture critic born of an era when it was possible
to be "German" and "Jewish," Benjamin believed in the
transcendent power of Kultur.
He believed that creative expression not only enriches and illuminates the
world we inhabit, but also provides the cultural adhesive that binds one
generation to the next, a Judeo-Germanic rendering of the ancient wisdom ars longa, vita brevis. Benjamin held the written word—printed and
bound—in especially high regard. He loved books. He was fascinated by their physicality,
by their durability, by their provenance. An astute collector, he argued,
could "read" a book the way a physiognomist
deciphered the essence of a person's character through his physical features.
"Dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings, and all the
like," Benjamin observed, "all these details must tell him
something—not as dry isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole." In
short, you could judge a book by its cover, and in
turn the collector by his collection. Quoting Hegel, Benjamin noted,
"Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight,"
and concluded, "Only in extinction is the collector comprehended." When Benjamin invoked a nineteenth-century
German philosopher, a Roman goddess, and an owl, he was of course alluding to
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's famous maxim: “The owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of dusk," by which Hegel meant that
philosophizing can begin only after events have run their course. Benjamin felt the same was true about
private libraries. Only after the collector had shelved his last book and
died, when his library was allowed to speak for itself, without the
proprietor to distract or obfus¬cate, could the
individual volumes reveal the “preserved" knowledge of their owner: how
he asserted his claim over them, with a name scribbled on the inside cover or
an ex libris bookplate pasted across an entire
page; whether he left them dog-eared and stained, or the pages uncut and
unread. Benjamin proposed that a private library serves
as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector,
leading him to the following philosophic conceit: we collect books in the
belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve
their collector. “Not that they come alive in him," Benjamin posited.
“It is he who lives in them." FOR THE LAST HALF CENTURY the remnants of
Adolf Hitler's library have occupied shelf space in climatized
obscurity in the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress. The twelve hundred
surviving volumes that once graced Hitler's bookcases in his three elegantly
appointed libraries—wood paneling, thick carpets, brass lamps, overstuffed
armchairs—at private residences in Munich, Berlin, and the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, now stand in densely
packed rows on steel shelves in an unadorned, dimly lit storage area of the
Thomas Jefferson Building in downtown Washington, a stone's throw from the
Washington Mall and just across the street from the United States Supreme
Court. The sinews of emotional logic that once ran
through this collection—Hitler shuffled his books ceaselessly and insisted on
reshelving them himself—have
been severed. Hitler's personal copy of his family genealogy is sandwiched
between a bound collection of newspaper articles titled Sunday Meditations and a folio of political cartoons from the
1920s. A handsomely bound facsimile edition of letters by Frederick the
Great, specially designed for Hitler's fiftieth birthday, lies on a shelf for
oversized books beneath a similarly massive presentation volume on the city
of Hamburg and an illustrated history of the German navy in the First World
War. Hitler's copy of the writings of the legendary Prussian general Carl von
Clausewitz, who famously declared that war was politics by other means,
shares shelf space beside a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed to “Monsieur Hitler vegetarien. ” When I first surveyed Hitler's surviving
books, in the spring of 2001,1 discovered that fewer
than half the volumes had been catalogued, and only two hundred of those were
searchable in the Library of Congress's online catalogue. Most were listed on
aging index cards and still bore the idiosyncratic numbering system assigned
them in the 1950s. At Brown University, in Providence, Rhode
Island, I found another eighty Hitler books in a similar state of benign
neglect. Taken from his Berlin bunker in the spring of 1945 by Albert
Aronson, one of the first Americans to enter Berlin after the German defeat,
they were donated to Brown by Aronson's nephew in the late 1970s. Today they
are stored in a walk-in basement vault, along with Walt Whitman's personal
copy of Leaves of Grass and the
original folios to John James Audubon's Birds
of America. Among the books at Brown, I found a copy of
Mein Kampf
with Hitler's ex libris bookplate, an analysis of
Wagner's Parsifal published in
1913, a history of the swastika from 1921, and a half dozen or so spiritual
and occult volumes Hitler acquired in Munich in the early 1920s, including an
account of supernatural occurrences, The
Dead Are Alive!, and a monograph on the prophecies of Nostradamus. I
discovered additional Hitler books scattered in public and private archives
across the United States and Europe. Several dozen of these surviving Hitler
books contain marginalia. Here I encountered a man who famously seemed never
to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a relentless tirade, a
ceaseless monologue, pausing to engage with the text, to underline words and
sentences, to mark entire paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside
one passage, a question mark beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic
series of parallel lines in the margin alongside a particular passage. Like
footprints in the sand, these markings allow us to trace the course of the
journey but not necessarily the intent, where attention caught and lingered,
where it rushed forward and where it ultimately ended. In a 1934 reprint of Paul Lagarde's German
Letters, a series of late- nineteenth-century essays that advocated the
systematic removal of Europe's Jewish population, I found more than one
hundred pages of penciled intrusions, beginning on page 41, where Lagarde calls for the “transplanting" of German and
Austrian Jews to Palestine, and extending to more ominous passages in which
he speaks of Jews as “pestilence." “This water pestilence must be
eradicated from our streams and lakes," Lagarde
writes on page 276, with a pencil marking bold affirmation in the margin.
“The political system without which it cannot exist must be eliminated." ………………………….. Hitler s own library was rapidly
disassembled in the chaos of his collapsing empire. By the time he shot
himself, American soldiers were already picking apart his collections in
Munich. In Hitler's office at the Nazi Party headquarters in the Brown House,
a young lieutenant found the copy of Henry Ford's My Life and Work that Hanfstaengl had
inscribed back in 1924; the lieutenant eventually took the two-volume set,
which "showed evidence of thumbing," back to New York and put it up
for sale at Scribner's Bookstore. At Hitler's Prince Regent Square residence,
war correspondent Lee Miller found Hitler's books partially intact. "To
the left of the public rooms was a library full of richly bound books and
many presentation volumes of signatures from well-wishers," she noted.
"The library was uninteresting in that everything of personal value had
been evacuated: empty shelves were bleak spoors of flight." A photograph
shows Miller seated at Hitler's desk. A dozen or so random books litter the
adjacent shelves—paperbacks, hardcovers, a large,
scuffed picture book of Nuremberg, three early editions of Mein Kampf
in their original dust jackets.
War correspondent
Lee Miller in Hitler's Prince Regent Square residence. Most personal books
had been removed by Hitler's staff. Note copies of Mein Kampf with the original dust
jackets. Four days later, advance troops of the
101st Airborne Division arrived on the Obersalzberg
to find Hitler's Berghof a smoldering ruin. In the
second-floor study, the hand-tooled bookcases had been reduced to ash,
leaving only charred concrete walls and a soot-blackened strongbox, in which
the soldiers found several first editions of Mein Kampf The rest of Hitler's books
were discovered in a converted bunker room. "At the far end were
arranged lounge chairs and reading lamps," an intelligence officer
assigned to the 101st reported. "Most of the books were con¬cerned with art, architecture, photography and
histories of campaigns and wars. A hasty inspection of the scattered books
showed that it [sic] was notably lacking in literature and almost entirely
devoid of drama and poetry." The classified report identifies only three
works by name: Genesis of the World War,
by the American revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Niccolo
Machiavelli's The Prince, and the
critiques by the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. The handsomely bound tomes with their
distinctive bookplates became the totem of choice for the victorious
soldiers. Newsreel footage records American soldiers picking through Hitler's
book collection. One sequence shows a soldier opening a large volume to
reveal the Hitler ex libris as the camera zooms in
for a close-up; in another, several men emerge from the bunker with stacks of
books under their arms. In the weeks that followed, the Berghof
collection was picked apart book by book. By May 25, when a delegation of
U.S. senators arrived on the Obersalzberg, they had
to content themselves with albums from Hitler's record collection. Not a
single book remained. In those same weeks, Hitler's book
collection in Berlin was also disassembled. At nine o'clock on the morning of
May 2, thirty-six hours after Hitler's suicide, a Soviet medical team entered
the nearly abandoned Fuehrerbunker.
They reemerged an hour later waving black lace
brassieres from Eva Braun's wardrobe and carrying satchels filled with
diverse souvenirs, including several first editions of Mein Kampf Successive waves of plundering
followed. When Albert Aronson arrived in Berlin as part of the American
delegation sent to negotiate the joint occupation of the city, his Soviet
hosts took him on a tour of Hitler's private quarters and as a courtesy let
him take an unclaimed pile of eighty books. In those same weeks, the entire
Reich Chancellery library—an estimated ten thousand volumes—was secured by a
Soviet “trophy brigade" and shipped to Moscow and never seen again.[1]
The only significant portions of Hitler library's to survive intact were the
three thousand books discovered in the Berchtesgaden salt mine, twelve
hundred of which made it into the Library of Congress. The rest appear to
have been "duped out" in the process of cataloguing the collection. Thousands more lie in the attics and
bookshelves of homes of veterans across the United States. Occasionally,
random volumes find their way to the public. Several years ago, a copy of
Peter Maag's Realm
of God and the Contemporary World, published in 1915, with "A.
Hitler" scrawled on the inside cover, was discovered in the fifty-cent
bin of a local library sale in upstate New York. Following Aronson's death,
his nephew donated the eighty books from the Fuehrerbunker to Brown
University. In the early 1990s, Daniel Traister,
head of the rare book collection at the University of Pennsylvania, was given
a biography of Frederick the Great along with several Berghof
trophies. An accompanying note read "Dan, you wouldn't believe how much
money people want to offer me for these things. So far, I haven't met one
whom I want to have them. Here: destroy them or keep them as you wish." A few years ago, I received a similar note
after writing an article on Hitler's library for The Atlantic Monthly. A Minnesota book dealer had inherited a
Hitler book her mother had purchased at auction in the 1970s. Initially
fascinated by the acquisition, the mother suffered a double bite of
conscience: she was uncomfortable with profiting from a Hitler artifact and
was equally uneasy about the motivations of a potential purchaser. After the
mother's death, her daughter inherited both the book and the dilemma. Having
read my article, and sensing that my interests were purely academic, she offered
me the book at cost. A week later, Hitler's copy of Body, Spirit and Living Reason, by Carneades,
arrived in a cardboard box. The treatise was in remarkably good
condition, a hefty tome bound in textured linen with leather triangles on each
corner and a matching leather spine with title and author embossed in gold.
The linen was partially frayed and the leather was scuffed in places, but
otherwise the volume was flawless. Opposite the Hitler ex libris,
a typewritten note had been tipped into the binding recording the volume's
provenance: This volume was taken from Adolph [sic]
Hitler's personal library located in the underground air-raid shelter in his
home at Berchtesgaden. It was picked up by Major A. J. Choos
as a souvenir for Mr. E. B. Horwath on May 5,1945. For several years, Body, Spirit and Living Reason haunted the bookshelves of my
Salzburg apartment until I, too, grew uncomfortable with its presence. Like
the Pennsylvania veteran and the Minnesota book dealer, I had no interest in
profiting from the volume and had serious concerns about its further
disposition. I ultimately resolved the dilemma by donating the volume to the
Archive of the Contemporary History of the Obersalzberg
in Berchtesgaden, a private repository established by a resident archivist to
preserve the history of the town, including this dark chapter.
The Hitler Library
in the rare book and manuscript division at the Library of Congress, as photographed
in the 1970s. After spending nearly a decade behind a
glass case in Hitler's second- floor Berghof
study—a silent witness to his daytime meetings and late-night reading—the Carneades volume had found its way back to Berchtesgaden,
where its journey had begun nearly seven decades earlier. Indeed, habent suafata libelli. APPENDIX A From This Is the Enemy, by Frederick Oechsner, 1942 I FOUND THAT [HITLER'S] PERSONAL LIBRARY,
which is divided between his residence in the Chancellery in Berlin and his
country home on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden,
contains roughly 16,300 books. They may be divided generally into three
groups: First, the military section containing some
7,000 volumes, including the campaigns of Napoleon, the Prussian kings; the
lives of all German and Prussian potentates who ever played a military role;
and books on virtually all of the well-known military campaigns in recorded history. There is Theodore Roosevelt's work on the
Spanish American War, also a book by General von Steuben, who drilled our
troops during the American Revolution. [Werner von] Blomberg,
when he was war minister, presented Hitler with 400 books, pamphlets and
monographs on the United States armed forces and he has read many of these. The military books are divided according to
countries. Those which were not available in German Hitler has had
translated. Many of them, especially on Napoleon's campaigns, are extensively
marginated in his own handwriting. There is a book
on the Gran Chaco dispute [the 1932-35 war between Paraguay and Bolivia] by
the German General [Hans] Kundt, who at one time
(like Captain Ernst Rohm) was an instructor of troops in Bolivia. There are
exhaustive works on uniforms, weapons, supply, mobilization,
the building-up of armies in peacetime, morale and ballistics. In fact, there
is probably not a single phase of military knowledge, ancient or modern,
which is not dealt with in these 7,000 volumes, and quite obviously Hitler
has read many of them from cover to cover. The second section of some 1,500 books
covers artistic subjects [such] as architecture, the theater, painting and
sculpture, which, after military subjects, are Hitlers chief interest. The books include works on surreal¬ism and Dada-ism, although Hitler has no use for
this type of art. One of his ironical marginal notes could be
roughly translated: "Modern art will revolutionize the world? Rot!"
In writing these notes Hitler never uses a fountain pen but an old-fashioned
pen or an indelible pencil. In drawers beneath the bookshelves he has a
collection of photographs, drawings [of] famous actors, dancers, singers,
both male and female. One book on the Spanish theater has pornographic
drawings and photographs, but there is no section on pornography, as such, in
Hitler's library. The third section includes works on
astrology and spiritualism pro-cured from all parts of the world and
translated where necessary. There are also spiritualistic photographs, and,
securely locked away, the 200 photographs of the stellar constellations on
important days in his life. These he has annotated in his own handwriting and
each has its own separate envelope. In this third section there is a
considerable part devoted to nutrition and diet. In fact, there are probably
a thousand books on this subject, many of them heavily marginated,
those marginal comments including the vegetarian observation: "Cows were
meant to give milk; oxen to draw loads." There are dozens of books on
animal breeding with the photographs of stallions and mares of famous name.
One interesting psychological angle here is that where stallions and mares
are shown on opposite pages, many of the mares have been crossed out in red
pencil as merely inferior females and unimportant compared with the stallion
males. There are some 400 books on the
Church—almost entirely on the Catholic Church. There is also a good deal of
pornography here, portraying alleged license in the priesthood: offenses such
as made up the charges in the immorality trials which the Nazis conducted
against priests at the height of the attack upon the Catholic Church. Many of
Hitler's marginal notes on this pornographic section are gross and uncouth.
Some pictures show Popes and Cardinals reviewing troops at moments in
history. The marginations here are: "Never
again" and "This is impossible now," showing that Hitler
proposes that the princes of the Church shall never again be allowed to gain
political positions in which they can command armies and otherwise exercise
temporal pow¬ers. Hitler is himself a Catholic,
though not a practicing one. Some 800 to 1,000 books are simple, popular
fiction, many of them pure trash in anybody's language. There are a large
number of detective stories. He has all of Edgar Wallace; adventure books of
the G. A. Henty class; love romances by the score,
including those by the leading roman¬tic sob sister
of Germany, Hedwig Courts-Mahler, in which wealth and poverty, and strength
and weakness are sharply contrasted and in which honor and chastity triumph
and the sweet secretary marries her millionaire boss. All of these flaming
volumes are in neutral covers so as not to reveal their titles. Hitler may
read them, but he doesn't want people to know that he does. Among Hitler's favorites is a complete set
of American Indian stories written by the German, Karl May, who had never
been to America. These books are known to every German youngster, and
Hitler's fondness for them as bedside reading suggests that he, like many a
German thirteen-year-old, has gone to sleep with the exploits of "Old Shatterhand" reeling through his brain. Hitler's
set, which was presented to him by Marshal Goering, is expensively bound in
vellum and kept in a special case. They are much thumbed and read and usually
one or two may be found in the small bedside bookcase with its green curtain
in Hitler's bedroom. Sociological works are strongly represented
in the library, including a unique book by Robert Ley,
written in 1935, on world sociological problems and solutions. This book
never was circulated. Six thousand copies were printed, 5,999 were destroyed;
the single remaining copy is Hitler's. The reason: all books and pamphlets on
National Socialism have to be submitted to a special Party commission before
being released for publication, and books by prominent Nazi individuals have
to be shown to Hitler himself The book, by Ley, a
notorious idolater, so idealized Hitler that even he couldn't stomach its
being published. Another suppressed book in Hitler's library
is Alfred Rosenberg's work on the proposed Nazi Reich-Church, of which today
there are only twelve copies in proof, although typewritten carbon copies of
some sections are known to exist and in mysterious ways to have circulated as
far as the United States. In earlier days, when he had time, Hitler
used to bind his own dam¬aged books. Hitler's own
best-seller, Mein Kampf
has yielded him a fancy fortune, estimated by German Banking circles to be
about 50,000,000 Reich mark ($20,000,000 at official
rates). With part of this sum, Hitler has amassed a collection of precious
stones valued at some 20,000,000 Reich marks, which he keeps in a special
safe built into the wall of his house at Berchtesgaden. The stones were bought for him in various
parts of the world by his friend Max Amann, head of
the Nazi publishing firm the Eher Verlag, in which Hitler has an interest. It was Hitler who put Max Amann in
charge of the Eher Verlag,
and it has turned out to be a lucrative job; Amann's
own fortune today is estimated by bankers at around 40,000,000 Reich marks.
With absolute autocratic control over all publishing enterprises in Germany,
it is no wonder that the Nazi Eher Verlag snowballed into a phenomenally profitable
enterprise for everybody connected with it, including Adolf Hitler. The Reich
Chancellor has never found it necessary to use his official salary, a large
part of which he turns over to charity. Among the books in Hitler's library is one
volume covering a field in which he has always shown particular interest:
namely, the study of hands, including those of as many famous people
throughout the ages as could be procured. Hitler, in fact, bases a good deal
of his judgment of people on their hands. In his first conversation with some
personality, whether political or military, German or foreign, he usually
most carefully observes his hands—their form, whether they are well cared
for, whether they are long and narrow or stumpy and broad, the shape of the
nails, the knuckle and joint formation and so on. Various generals and
diplomats have wondered why Hitler sometimes, after starting a conversation
in a cordial and friendly way, became cool as he went along, and often closed
the discourse curtly or abruptly without much progress having been made. They
learned only later that Hitler had not been pleased by the shape of their
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