Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  That August, during a membership meeting, Hitler was accorded dictatorial powers. At a meeting of the party leadership on September 10, Hitler exercised his new mandate. He replaced Drexler as party chairman, put Max Amann in charge of party finances, and ejected Otto Dickel from the party. The meeting record preserves this last action in explicit detail: “Mr. Otto Dickel from Augsburg, the author of the book Resurgence of the West, is expelled, by a unanimous vote of the board, from the National Socialist German Workers Party.”

  Five weeks later, on October 22, 1921, Hitler exercised full authority over the movement by issuing a broad-ranging memorandum that provided for an overhaul of the nascent movement. The Nazi Party was to be moved from its makeshift headquarters in a back room at the Sternecker Beer Hall to its first independent office, at 12 Cornelius Street. A party archive was to be created that would preserve the history of the Nazi movement.3 It provided for the establishment of a “secret service,” the forerunner to the Gestapo, intended to provide Hitler with intelligence on potential threats both within and outside his movement. With the issuance of Memorandum 10, the thirty-two-year-old political upstart came into his own, exercising his full authority to shape the Nazi Party at will, and institutionalizing a state of paranoia that was to become a signature feature of his movement. That same Saturday, his sixty-year-old mentor inscribed a hardcover second edition of Peer Gynt to his “dear friend.”

  Even though Hitler effectively sidelined Dickel as a political threat, he also recognized the need to address what we might call the Nazi Party’s “Dickel deficit,” the absence of a philosophical or ideological canon. On party membership cards, along with relevant personal data—date of birth, date of membership, party number, and photograph—a list of recommended readings was now included. The titles appear to be cobbled together from Hitler’s intellectual rummaging at the National Socialist Institute and writings snatched from his immediate circle of associates: three books by Gottfried Feder on “interest slavery” and tax reform; six works by Alfred Rosenberg, including Traces of Jews in the Course of Time, Amorality in the Talmud, and Zionism as an Enemy of the State; a detailed, point-by-point annotation of the Nazi Party’s twenty-five points, Essence, Principles, and Goals of the National Socialist Workers Party; and a collection of poems by Dietrich Eckart. It also included Henry Ford’s The International Jew. A boldface headline at the head of the list reads, “Books that every National Socialist must know.” Beneath it is the address for the German Nationalist Bookstore, 15 Thiersch Street, just down the street from Eckart’s office, and for a bookshop adjacent to the Hofbräuhaus in central Munich.

  Hitler’s personal trauma over the Dickel affair continued to echo in his speeches for months and years to come. In handwritten notes for a speech in August 1921, he wrote “Dr. Dickel” in bold letters, underlined it twice, then scrawled “bad tendency.” That December, Hitler denounced Resurgence as an “Egyptian dream book” and its author as a “professor whose detachment from the real world soars to the clouds.” The following month, Hitler threatened that “any Dickel” who “claims to be a National Socialist, whether in mind or spirit, is our enemy and must be vanquished.” Four years later, Hitler was still fulminating over Dickel. During a speech on loyalty to a gathering of Nazi Party leaders in June 1925, he recounted his personal challenge to Dickel. “Where was the promised obedience?” Hitler asked. Nothing short of blind obedience would be tolerated, he insisted, even in the face of folly. “A leader can make mistakes, no question about that,” Hitler said. “But following a bad decision will achieve the final goal better than personal freedom.” It was, of course, a dictum to which an entire nation ultimately adhered, with catastrophic consequences.

  Hitler’s list of recommended readings printed on Nazi Party membership cards included works by Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and Henry Ford.

  Dickel also haunts the pages of Mein Kampf, an invisible presence never mentioned by name but shadowing the author as he rails against the “intellectual” who “believes himself in all seriousness to be ‘educated,’ to understand something of life” while in fact “growing more and more removed from the world.” Such people, Hitler says, belong either in “a sanatorium or in parliament.” Dickel also seems to be on Hitler’s mind when he makes his case for his singular ability to hold a crowd by tallying the shortcomings of others: Gottfried Feder is a “theoretician not a politician”; Karl Harrer is “certainly widely educated” but “no speaker for the masses”; and Anton Drexler is “likewise not very significant as a speaker.”

  Like a beer hall Banquo, Dickel haunts a closing scene of Mein Kampf as Hitler trumpets the coherency and comprehensibility of the Nazi Party program. “And when I finally submitted the twenty-five theses, point for point, to the masses and asked them personally to pronounce judgment on them, one after another was accepted with steadily mounting joy, unanimously and again unanimously,” Hitler writes. “And when the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.”

  Amid this beer hall triumphalism, one cannot help but sense a belated response to Dickel’s challenge in Augsburg, and in the shrill insistence, the insecurity of a man who, Hanfstaengl recalled, once responded to counsel given by a distinguished Munich professor, “Ach Herr Professor, that is all very good but you must never forget how terribly difficult it is for someone without a name or position or academic qualification to work himself up to the position where his name is identified with a political program. You underrate all the bitter hard work involved.”

  * * *

  1 I found the book among a cache of Hitler family memorabilia taken from Paula Hitler’s Vienna apartment at the end of the war by a neighbor who later donated them to a Linz archive. Along with diverse family items dating back to Hitler’s youth, including an account book of daily household expenses, postcards, and embroidery with the initials of Hitler’s mother, there is also a picture book of Munich that Hitler inscribed to his sister when she visited him for two weeks in February 1922.

  2 The papers were part of the estate of Anni Obster, Eckart’s companion at the time of his death. I was able to study the original documents in Berchtesgaden before they were transferred to a private collection outside Germany.

  3 The Third Reich Collection at the Library of Congress contains copies of more than two hundred primary source documents prepared for an exhibition of the early Nazi Party history. The materials include internal Nazi Party correspondence, posters of beer hall rallies, an excerpt from an accounting book, and diverse materials recording early Nazi Party confrontations with the police, among them Dietrich Eckart’s fingerprints from his police file.

  BOOK THREE

  The Hitler Trilogy

  The problem for me is that after my release on October 1, I don’t expect significant income from my book until mid-December . . .

  ADOLF HITLER, in a letter from Landsberg Prison, September 13, 1924

  AMONG THE TWELVE hundred surviving Hitler books at the Library of Congress are a dozen or so copies of Hitler’s legendary twin-volume best seller, Mein Kampf. The earliest of these is a special second edition of both volumes, individually bound in cream-colored calf’s leather with gold embossing, and dated 1926. Each book bears the printed notation: “There were 500 copies of this work produced as a deluxe edition in the following design and personally signed by the author. This copy bears the number 155.” The space for Hitler’s signature remains blank.

  There is also a special numbered edition of volume two from 1927, bound in red leather and bearing the number 178, and a specially bound set of volumes one and two printed on parchment in a handsome leather slipcase, but without a publication date. In addition, there are three unbound copies of volume two numbered 70, 110, and 122; two bundles of unsorted signatures from 1940; a twenty-seven-page typewritten manuscript for a name and subject index; and several six-volume sets of Me
in Kampf in a special Braille edition. These latter books are the size of small tombstones—they must be lifted with two hands—with large swastikas blind-stamped into the thick cardboard covers. The eclectic nature of these books and the absence of the Hitler ex libris suggest that they were probably taken from the plundered storage of the Nazi Party’s Central Publishing House, Diet-rich Eckart’s old office, at 11 Thiersch Street, in the summer of 1945, and were mistakenly included among Hitler’s remnant books.

  Only two editions of Mein Kampf are known with certainty to have been in Hitler’s personal collection. One is a leather-bound edition from 1930, taken from the basement of the Berghof by Edgar Breitenbach, a member of the Library of Congress “mission” in May 1945, which was donated to the rare book collection by his widow in 1991.1 When I looked at the volume, I found extensive marginalia, clearly not in Hitler’s hand, with numerous question marks and, in one place, the scribbled notation, “im Gegenteil,” or “quite the opposite.” I found a second copy among the eighty books taken from the Führerbunker by Albert Aronson shortly after Hitler’s suicide in the spring of 1945, and now at Brown University. This second copy, almost certainly acquired for Hitler’s collection in the Reich Chancellery, is a 1938 “people’s edition,” with both volumes bound together in a dark blue linen cover; the Hitler ex libris is pasted on the inside cover.

  Of all the possible means of book collecting, Walter Benjamin has observed, “writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method,” and recalls Schoolmaster Wutz, the endearing protagonist of a popular eighteenth-century novel, who is so poorly paid and of such limited financial means that he cannot afford to buy books and resorts to visiting book dealers, where he notes especially intriguing titles, then returns home to author his own books using the plagiarized titles.

  In this manner, the frugal schoolteacher amasses a sizable personal library. However, most real authors, Benjamin notes, feel compelled to write books out of existential rather than material poverty. “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like,” he says with a waggishness that belies the profundity of this passing remark: Most writers feel compelled to put words into the world to express ideas or stories that have not yet been articulated, or that they feel have not been adequately expressed or, at the very least, seem to require or deserve repeating in their particular idiom. In Adolf Hitler’s case, the initial motivation was vengeance.

  On the evening of Thursday, November 8, 1923, around eight-thirty, Hitler stormed into the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall in Munich with a squadron of armed storm troopers, silenced the room with a single pistol shot into the ceiling, extracted at gunpoint a loyalty oath from Munich’s assembled political leadership—Gustav von Kahr, Hans Ritter von Seisser, and Otto von Lussow—and declared a “national revolution.” The following morning, Hitler assembled two thousand right-wing radicals in central Munich, intending to replicate Mussolini’s March on Rome that had established a fascist government in Italy the previous autumn. Hitler planned to seize power in Bavaria then proceed to Berlin where he intended to topple the democratic government with a popular uprising. On this gray Friday morning, Hitler, accompanied by the war hero Erich Ludendorff, marched his men through the streets of Munich to the Odeon Square, where they were met with salvos of gunfire from a military cordon. In the ensuing chaos, sixteen putschists died. Hitler dove to the pavement when the men on either side of him were killed. He was then rushed to a waiting vehicle and taken to safety, only to be arrested three days later at the lakeside villa of Ernst Hanfstaengl, where he was nursing a shoulder wrenched in the fall.

  Almost immediately, Kahr, Seisser, and Lussow distanced themselves from the failed enterprise. They claimed to have counseled Hitler against the attempted coup, which they had, and that Hitler had coerced their cooperation at gunpoint, which he had. Hitler was alternately distraught and enraged by their “betrayal.” He first contemplated suicide, then staged a brief hunger strike, and finally decided to “settle accounts.” He borrowed a typewriter from the prison administration and pounded out a sixty-page “accounting”—Abrechnung—of the two-day debacle, much of which served as a basis for his defense in his monthlong trial for treason, which concluded with Hitler declaring, “Even if you declare us ‘guilty’ a thousand times, the eternal goddess of the last judgment”—by which he meant history—“will smile and shred the prosecution’s indictment, and will smile at the court’s verdict, because she will acquit us.” Despite the belligerence, Hitler’s prison sentence was scandalously light: five years with the possibility of early parole and credit for time served. By Hitler’s calculation, he could be free by October.

  Hitler’s incarceration was a fitting complement to his light sentence. The detention center in Landsberg am Lech, just west of Munich, resembled a faux medieval castle complete with twin turrets and an inner courtyard for daily constitutionals and soccer matches. The prison included meeting rooms and a lending library. Until Hitler’s arrival, the most renowned inmate was Anton von Arco-Valley, a Bavarian count who was condemned to death for the murder of a socialist political leader; that sentence was commuted to Ehrenhaft in Landsberg, from which the count was released after less than four years.

  As a right-wing political radical, Hitler held a privileged status in Landsberg. He was assigned to a second-floor suite of rooms—Stube 6—that consisted of a central sitting area and adjacent private bedrooms, which were assigned to convicted fellow putschists. From his bedroom, he looked out across the rolling hills and fields of central Bavaria. He was permitted to retain his dog, and visitor privileges were expanded to accommodate the incessant pilgrimage of associates, patrons, and well-wishers. The Landsberg registry records scores of them.

  Hitler in Landsberg Prison, 1924, from Hans Kallenbach’s memoir, With Adolf Hitler in Landsberg Prison. The author’s inscription to Hitler reads:

  “May God protect our Führer!”

  Hans Kallenbach recalled that the electricity curfew—Stromsperre— was lifted to permit Hitler to pursue his habitual nocturnal reading. “Only a single light burned, usually late into the night, and that was the lamp in the room of the Führer,” Kallenbach wrote in his memoir. “In these lonely night hours Adolf Hitler sat bent over his books and papers and worked on Germany’s resurrection.” Prison guards were said to greet him with “Sieg Heil!” In this atmosphere of commodious and courteous confinement, the celebrity inmate prepared himself to write a book.

  On Monday, May 5, 1924, Hitler sent a letter to Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, in Bayreuth, describing his intention to write “a thorough settling of accounts with those gentlemen who on November 9th enthusiastically shouted ‘Hurrah’” and afterward attempted to show the “impulsiveness of the insane undertaking.” As the month progressed, Hitler’s authorial ambitions grew. What began as a mere “settling of accounts” assumed greater proportions as he expanded the book into the story of his political career in Munich, which he initially titled A Four and a Half Year Battle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice.

  While vengeance was certainly the initial driving force behind Hitler’s decision to write a book, financial considerations also played a role. Hitler’s legal counsel, Lorenz Roder, from Linz, had worked closely with him to prepare his defense, even securing testimony from Hitler’s high-school history teacher, but his efforts came at a high price. In one letter, Hitler wrote that Roder’s legal fees “make my hair stand on end.” Hitler’s financial concerns seem to have been common knowledge, as suggested by a prison memorandum: “He is expecting a large printing, and hopes to be able to meet his financial obligations,” Otto Leybold, the prison director, noted.

  Hitler assumed that the drama of the failed putsch, coupled with the subsequent publicity generated by his trial, positioned him to negotiate a favorable arrangement with a publisher. He was wrong. Ernst Hanfstaengl, who visited Hitler five times that April, was unable
to convince his brother to consider Hitler’s book for the family publishing house. Another prominent publisher, Ernst Boepple, reportedly offered Hitler a “pathetic” royalty arrangement. Walter Stang, head of Ring Publishers in Munich, visited Hitler in Landsberg on April 25 and returned three weeks later with two additional Ring representatives. Stang was to pay two subsequent visits in the weeks ahead. At the same time, Max Amann began assessing the potential of Hitler’s book for Franz Eher Verlag, the Nazi Party press. In early May, Amann commissioned a study of the market potential for a special edition of a Hitler book. The assessment, completed at the end of the month, determined “that if a collector’s edition of Hitler’s work in a special binding with a printing of only 500 books, numbered and signed by Herr Adolf Hitler, were to appear it should be worth at least 500 marks.”

  Apparently, this was enough to convince Amann. In early June, Eher issued a publicity brochure announcing the July publication of A Four and a Half Year Battle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice: An Accounting. It was accompanied by a photograph of the author, not as the demonic beer hall orator, or even as the storm trooper who arrived on the morning of the putsch in a steel trench helmet and bundled in a thick military jacket, but instead dressed in a suit and tie with his hair slicked back and his signature moustache carefully manicured. A swastika pin was discreetly positioned on his left lapel. But as was so often the case with Hitler, ambition outstripped his capacity to deliver on his promises. July came and went without a book.