My Führer
On the 14th anniversary of the day you first set foot in the Sternecker, Mrs. Gahr is presenting to you the list of your first fellow fighters. It is our conviction that this hour is the hour of birth of our wonderful movement and of our new Reich. With loyalty until death.
Sieg Heil!
The Old Comrades
The card bore no date and the list of early Nazi Party members was missing, but the mention of “Mrs. Gahr,” presumably the wife of Otto Gahr, the goldsmith, whom Hitler charged with casting the first metal swastikas for the Nazi Party, as well as the reference to the fourteenth anniversary of Hitler’s first appearance in the Sternecker Beer Hall, preserves in briefest outline the trajectory of Hitler from political upstart in 1919 to chancellor of the German Reich in 1933.
For this book, I have selected those surviving volumes that possessed either emotional or intellectual significance for Hitler, those which occupied his thoughts in his private hours and helped shape his public words and actions. One of the earliest is a guidebook he acquired for four marks on a dreary Monday in late November 1915 while serving as a twenty-six-year-old corporal on the western front. The last is a biography he was reading thirty years later in the weeks leading up to his suicide in the spring of 1945. I have attempted to be judicious in my choice of Hitler volumes, selecting only those books for which there is compelling evidence that Hitler had them in his possession. I have exercised similar caution when it comes to the marginalia since the “authorship” of penciled intrusions cannot necessarily be determined definitively. Once again, I have relied on corroborating evidence, and I discuss individual cases in the text, drawing when available on the determinations of previous scholarship. To make titles accessible to the non-German reader, I generally use English translations of the original titles except in such obvious cases as Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or My Struggle.
In closing his essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin considers the emotional as well as financial investment he has made in individual volumes. He recalls vividly the day in 1915 when he purchased a special edition of Honoré de Balzac’s The Magic Skin (Peau de chagrin) with its magnificent steel plate engravings, and details the exact circumstances under which he acquired a rare 1810 treatise on “occultism and natural philosophy,” Posthumous Fragments of a Young Physicist, by the German writer Johann Wilhelm Ritter.
The books flood Benjamin with memories: “memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of these several thousand volumes.”
Hitler left no equivalent narrative of his own collection, no account of how one or the other volumes came into his possession or its particular emotional significance, but the various inscriptions, marginalia, and other details provide insight into their personal and intellectual significance for his life. What follows are the stories they tell.
Adolf Hitler, thirty-six, posing with his books in his first Munich apartment.
BOOK ONE
Frontline Reading, 1915
What the world of the twentieth century finds most fascinating about the capital of the German Reich are things other than the beauty of its historical monuments or its rich cultural heritage.
MAX OSBORN, Berlin, volume 41 in the series Famous Cultural Sites, published in Leipzig, 1909
ON A DREARY Monday in late November 1915, Adolf Hitler, then a corporal in the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, left his billet in a two-story farmhouse on the edge of Fournes, two miles behind the front in northern France, and with his trench coat pulled tight against the autumnal chill and his hobnailed boots clacking on the dank cobblestones, walked into town to buy a book.
For the twenty-six-year-old frontline soldier, it promised to be a quiet week, not unlike the previous one whose tranquillity had been broken only occasionally by enemy gunfire and the threat of gas attacks. On the previous Tuesday, when the dense fog had briefly lifted, three British biplanes had circled the sector for several hours. Their appearance was followed by clanging gas alarms that sent frontline soldiers fumbling for their rubber masks and goggles. In November 1915, poison gas was relatively new to the front.
Only a few weeks earlier, several “black soldiers,” subjects from India pressed into British service, had defected to the German lines, warning of an imminent attack. Fearful of this silent new weapon, the men built fires and stood in the billowing wood smoke to test these awkward contraptions. That evening, they watched as an eerie yellow cloud drifted into no-man’s-land, lingered menacingly, and then, as the breeze shifted, returned with equal leisure to the British lines. Several gas alarms had followed since, but without incident. For Tuesday, November 16, 1915, the regimental log records: “false alarm.”
The following Monday, when Hitler bought his book, the day dawned gray and cold with a dense ground fog that continued to dampen all but the most sporadic gunfire. As the mist lifted in late morning, British artillery peppered the regiment’s two-mile sector with scattered barrages, targeting the command posts and littering Sector H with shrapnel shells. From his “rest quarters” in Fournes, Hitler would have heard the bombardments as muffled thunder along the horizon.
As a Meldegänger, or “message runner,” assigned to regimental headquarters, Hitler generally worked a rotating shift: three days at the front and three days resting in Fournes. From Fournes, Hitler would walk along a country road to the neighboring village of Fromelles, where the frontline command post and dressing station were located amid the ruined buildings, and from there through a series of communications trenches into a nightmare landscape of cratered fields and ruined villages. To facilitate troop movements and help orient the message runners, the French villages had been assigned German names.
The place-names echoed the devastation: Knallhüte (Blasted Hut), Backofen (The Oven), and at a bend where the British and German trenches nearly touched, Totes Schwein (Dead Swine). One village was named Petzstadt after Friedrich Petz, the regimental commander. On the left flank, where the RIR 16 abutted on the RIR 17, a razed farm had been dubbed “Dachau,” after the picturesque artists’ colony just north of Munich, which had earned two stars in the Michelin guides of the era, but would acquire very different resonances in the decades to come.
While Meldegänger assignments were frequently mundane, the work could be perilous in the extreme. When shelling disrupted telephone lines, runners were forced to dart amid flying shrapnel while most soldiers huddled in underground bunkers. The messages were supposed to be coded for priority—X for normal delivery, XX for heightened importance, XXX for urgent—but men frequently found themselves placed at gratuitous risk. “I was repeatedly exposed to heavy artillery fire even though it was nothing but a postcard that needed to be delivered,” Hitler later recalled. During the first day of fighting at the battle of Wytschaete in the fall of 1914, the eight-man unit was cut in half, with three men killed outright and one critically wounded. By the autumn of 1915, Hitler was the only original member left in the unit.
Image from Hitler’s copy of a war memoir by fellow veteran Adolf Meyer. The German caption reads: Volunteer Adolf Hitler, orderly with the List Regiment, May 1915.
RIR 16 sector map, from Adolf Meyer’s memoir. Note “Dachau” on lower left.
In early October 1915, during a battle to dislodge British troops from a salient known as the Hohenzollernwerk, the message runners were given an even more precarious assignment when they were pressed into service shuttling armloads of grenades to the front, as the frontline soldiers literally blasted the British from their trenches yard by yard, using fifteen hundred hand grenades to clear one three-hundred yard stretch of trench and another two thousand to clear five hundred more yards. “The battle for the Hohenzollernwerk demonstrated again that the hand grenade is the most horrific and effective weapon for close combat,” Petz reported after the battle.<
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In October, rain brought the autumn offensives to a standstill as soldiers on both sides of no-man’s-land turned to battling mud rather than one another. Among Hitler’s remnant books, I found his unit’s five-hundred-page regimental history, Four Years on the Western Front: History of the List Regiment, RIR 16; Memoirs from a German Regiment, exquisitely bound in brown leather, in which the misery and desperation of those weeks is vividly preserved. When the incessant rain pushes a river over its banks, the water floods into the RIR 16 trenches with near apocalyptic consequences. “Two of our company units . . . were so surprised by the deluge that the men in the trench barely had time to grab their guns and equipment and to rescue themselves on the rampart,” the regimental history records. “They clung there and cowered, a mire before them and a raging stream behind them, many of them exposed without protection to the open view of the enemy.” Their only salvation was the fact that the British were equally occupied with rescuing themselves from the flood. The regimental history calculates that for each frontline soldier poised to fight the British, ten men were battling the mud.
The daily log, now at the Bavarian War Archive in Munich, not only confirms the frontline soldier’s uneven battle against the elements but also his equally uneven struggle with technology at the frontline pumping stations. For November 22, 1915, the regimental commander records a typical day:
Electric pumps in Sector A 6–11 in the evening power shortage
11–11.30 evening, Damaged hose
7.45 morning–12.30 afternoon power shortage
In sector c 8–12 morning power shortage
In these rain-idled weeks, Hitler was quartered in Fournes with only occasional assignments. On October 21, Petz dispatched him and another message runner, Hans Lippert, to the city of Valenciennes, to requisition a new mattress. According to the requisition slip, Hitler and Lippert were permitted to remain there overnight. On the return trip, Hitler carried the mattress most of the way since Lippert held a superior rank.
A month and a day later, still idled by the elements, Hitler walked into Fournes and purchased an architectural history of Berlin by the celebrated art critic Max Osborn. Despite its three hundred pages, Osborn’s Berlin is a notably slender volume, as easily slipped into the pocket of a trench coat as into the handbag of a cultural tourist, with a water-resistant, olive drab cover with berlin embossed in bold crimson and complemented by a profile of the Brandenburg Gate, whose six Doric columns stand in parallel ranks with the rigidly spaced letters of the book’s title.
At some point that day, Hitler returned to the relative comfort of his two-story farmhouse billet, opened this hardbound volume, and laid claim to its content in a notably timid hand, scribbling his name and the place and date in the upper-right-hand corner of the inside cover in a space no larger than that of a small postage stamp.
Eighty years later, Osborn’s book attests to its frontline service.
Blunted and brown, the corners curl inward like dried lemon rind. The spine dangles precariously from fraying linen tendons, exposing the thread-laced signatures like so many rows of rope-bound bones. A mud stain blots out the final letters in “November.” When I opened this fragile volume in the Rare Book Reading Room of the Library of Congress, with the muffled sounds of late-morning traffic wafting through the hushed silence, a fine grit drizzled from its pages.
At roughly the same time that Hitler acquired his copy of Berlin, Max Osborn passed within a few miles of Fournes, on the road from Lille to Auber. He had arrived at the front the previous January, a few months after Hitler, on assignment for the Vossische Zeitung, the prestigious Berlin newspaper for which he had been writing for nearly two decades.
Hitler acquired this architectural guide to Berlin in late November 1915, while serving on the western front.
Born into the same privileged Berlin milieu that had shaped Walter Benjamin’s intellectual tastes and interests, Osborn had established himself as one of the leading art critics of the day, gaining a wide readership with his irreverent commentaries on aesthetics and culture. In a cultural history of Satan, Osborn declared angels “the most boring of God’s creatures” and devoted three hundred pages to chronicling diverse satanic follies in art, music, and literature. He befriended the painter Max Liebermann and coined the phrase “expressionist rococo.”
In 1908, when the publisher Seemann Verlag asked Osborn to author a guide to Berlin, he agreed but with the understanding that he was an art critic not a tour guide. Thus, he welcomed the reader to his Berlin with this impious caveat: Why would his publisher consider this city among the “cultural capitals” of Europe when “what the world of the twentieth century finds most fascinating about the capital of the German Reich are things other than the beauty of its historical monuments or its rich cultural heritage”?
Osborn arrived on the western front with this same sporting diffidence. As he traversed the battlefields of northern France, visiting the devastation along the Somme, at the Marne, and near Verdun, Osborn found little that was new or shocking. The human slaughter there appeared to be little more than flesh-and-blood re-creations of the sprawling canvases he had studied in the National Gallery in Berlin. Osborn had seen it all before.
The German soldiers in their spiked headgear and with their bayonets appeared as latter-day incarnations of the pike-bearing warriors from sixteenth-century murals. The flamethrowers with their plumes of smoke and fire spewing across the broken earth had been vividly woven into these early tapestries. “And that favored horrific instrument of close combat today, the hand grenade,” Osborn wrote for his readers in Germany, “already played a role in the seventeenth century, as well as in the armies of the grand dukes.” When the battlefront critic glimpsed a message runner on a horse galloping across an open field, both man and beast fitted with gas masks, he likened it to a scene from a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch.
In late May 1915, Osborn and Hitler nearly crossed paths on the battlefield at Ypres, where the Germans had repulsed the second major British offensive along this front, with both sides suffering massive casualties. The RIR 16 lost more than half its men: sixteen hundred soldiers and all but one officer. Osborn arrived shortly after the slaughter and surveyed the battlefield from the unscathed spire of the Ypres cathedral, which towered miraculously above the ruined town. Amid the ravage, Osborn found himself witness to the “second act” of the war’s greatest battle.
“Crushed trench defenses and bunker emplacements rise from the ground,” he observed. “Crumbling walls of earth, crushed sandbags, scattered debris, stretches of barbed wire twisted and broken: Filthy remnants litter the ground, shreds of uniforms, bloody rags, socks, canteens, fragments of French newspapers, torn pages from English magazines, ration cans, empty cartridges, unspent ammunition.” The bodies had already been removed, but the smell of death lingered, tainting the air with an aroma of antiseptic and decaying flesh.
That autumn, Osborn toured the battlefields west of Lille, visiting the frontline towns of Richebourg and Neuve-Chapelle and passing along the front near Fournes. “When you arrive at the villages, they are pathetic and ruined, houses gutted by bombs, farms burned, walls riddled with bullet holes,” he wrote. “A hopeless landscape!”
By then, Osborn’s poetic enthusiasms had tempered. “There lie the rotting corpses the attackers have left behind,” he observed. “Hordes of rats feed on them, growing large and fat, almost like disgusting little dogs, nauseating to look at, and when they mistakenly run into the trenches, the soldiers, filled with disgust, kill them.” He found it “terrifying, simply incomprehensible” that “all the images of grace have transformed into images of horror.”
As the war entered its second full year, with no end in sight to the butchery, Osborn sensed a shift not only in himself but also among the soldiers. On both sides of no-man’s-land, men were growing increasingly antagonistic and embittered. “The fierce days of fighting toward the end of September have brought a new emotion into the war that ha
s moved from trench to trench,” Osborn wrote on October 22, 1915. “The fighting has grown grimmer, more bitter, more vicious. The bitterness with which the great offensive was launched and beaten back can still be felt.” Times had changed.
On Christmas Eve 1914, soldiers on both sides had gathered in no-man’s-land to celebrate the holiday, and in the months that followed tossed friendly notes to one another, shared jam and cigarettes, and even held their fire so the enemy could retrieve or bury his dead.
They now exchanged insults and “hateful and nasty” missives. The French composed rhymed couplets insulting the Kaiser and the crown prince. One message tossed across no-man’s-land read “The Boches are swine and should be guillotined not shot.” Years later, Hitler would recall a similar hardening of the human spirit. “By the winter of 1915–16, this inner struggle had for me been decided,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. “At last my will was undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter, I was now calm and determined.” Hitler noted that his nerves and reason had been hardened by constant battle. “The young volunteer had become an old soldier,” he wrote. “And this transformation had occurred in the whole army.”
By November 1915, after more than a year at the front, Hitler’s “transformation” was already in evidence, an emotional shift that is preserved in remnant artifacts in the Hitler library. In a leather-bound photostat copy of Hitler’s military record, which includes his enlistment papers, he gives his permanent domicile as Munich, and does not list any immediate blood relatives, not his older half-siblings Alois and Angela, nor his younger sister Paula. By 1914, all regular contact with his immediate family appears to have been broken. Paula later said she assumed he was dead.
Hitler's Private Library Page 2