Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Hitler missed his July deadline in good part because of his preoccupation with visitors and his attempt to stage-manage the banned Nazi movement, issuing underground decrees under the code name “Rolf Eidhalt,” a scrambling of letters from his own name Eidhalt translates to mean “Keep the Oath.” As political infighting increased and the movement began to fracture, Hitler withdrew from politics and turned his full attention to his book.

  “Herr Hitler has announced from Landsberg that he has given up leadership of the National Socialist movement and will avoid any form of political activity for the length of his imprisonment,” the Völkischer Kurier (People’s Courier) reported in early July. “The reason for this decision lies in the impossibility at present of assuming any practical responsibility, as well as the general overload of work.” The Kurier noted in particular that Hitler was occupied with a “lengthy book” and wanted to make certain he had “adequate time” to devote to its completion.

  Hitler reduced outside visitors to all but his closest associates—Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder, Max Amann—and a few friends and family members, among them Helene Bechstein and Elsa Bruckmann and his niece and nephew Geli and Leo Raubal. He abandoned his evening readings of his manuscript, a fact reported by Rudolf Hess in a letter to his wife. Leybold, the prison administrator, confirmed Hitler’s change of habits, observing that he had “withdrawn from political discussion” and now spent most of his time working on his book.

  As Hitler’s work habits changed, so did his vision for his book. What had begun as a “settling of accounts” in December 1923, and expanded into a “four and a half year battle against lies, stupidity and cowardice” in the spring of 1924, now bloomed in the summer heat into a Dickensian epic in which “the connection to the preceding chapters was broken,” Hitler told Hess. Hitler now emerged as the hero of his own life.

  Once again, Leybold was there to record the moment. He noted that Hitler’s book “consists of his autobiography together with his thoughts about the bourgeoisie, Jewry, Marxism, the German revolution and Bolshevism, and the National Socialist movement with the events leading up to November 8, 1923.” In expanding his original “accounting” and reframing it as an autobiography, Hitler not only expanded his own authorial ambitions but also brought hermetic closure to the Benjaminian conceit: the author preserving himself in a book that is in turn preserved within his collection.

  Adolf Hitler famously described his time at Landsberg Prison as his “higher education at state expense,” and welcomed his incarceration as an opportunity to catch up on backlogged reading. “Personally I have somewhat more time and leisure after the conclusion of the trial,” Hitler wrote in his letter to Siegfried Wagner. “I can finally get back to reading and learning. I hardly had time even to familiarize myself with the new nationalist books appearing on the market.”

  Ernst Hanfstaengl ascribed to the idled Nazi leader a more ambitious intellectual fare that allegedly included the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the right-wing historian Heinrich von Treitschke, and the political leader Otto von Bismarck. Though none of these individuals are represented among the surviving books from Hitler’s prison years, I did find an unread biography of the eighteenth-century thinker Immanuel Kant by Houston Stewart Chamberlain as well as a Gandhi biography by the French pacifist and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, with the inscription, “Fortunate is the man who is a nation—his nation, that lay in its grave and will rise again.”

  Hitler almost certainly bristled at the association with the Hindu leader. “The admiration of Gandhi is in my eyes a racial perversity,” Hitler once observed. The inherently martial nature of Germans was, he noted, incompatible with Gandhi’s peaceful civil disobedience. “The so-called ‘fight for freedom’ of the Indian people holds as little interest for me as the battles of the German people fifteen years ago was of interest to the Indians,” Hitler sniped. The book shows no sign of having been read, nor does a six-hundred-page anthology of Gandhi’s prison writings given to Hitler in those same months.

  The one book I found with extensive marginalia is a collection of short essays by the German surgeon turned best-selling author of self-help counsel, Carl Ludwig Schleich. This thin volume, published in 1924, with “For happiness”—“Zur Freude”—scribbled on the inside cover opposite Hitler’s ex libris bookplate, contains an eclectic selection of essays on happiness, beauty, creativity, genius, and immortality.

  While there is no definitive evidence that the marginalia are from Hitler’s hand, the penciled lines repeatedly underscore passages related to politics and the general relationship between the public and the individual, as on page 26, where the following passage has been highlighted with two bold strikes in the margin:

  It is questionable whether there can be geniuses in politics. The political leader belongs to the nation. He has to have character. The genius belongs to all mankind. He is an exemplary personality. There are politicians with genius but no political geniuses.

  In one place there is a pencil mark beside the the passage “Geniuses are only recognized after their deaths, especially in Germany.”

  There has been much speculation on Hitler’s sources for Mein Kampf, but few specifics. Otto Strasser, an early Hitler associate, attributed key concepts to conversation rather than reading. “In this book you come across Houston Stewart Chamberlain and [Paul] Lagarde, two authors whose ideas were conveyed to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart,” Strasser observed, also identifying Gottfried Feder, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher as sources.

  The one book among Hitler’s extant prison readings that left a noticeable intellectual footprint in Mein Kampf is a well-thumbed copy of Racial Typology of the German People by Hans F. K. Günther, known as “Racial Günther” for his fanatical views on racial purity. Hitler included Günther in his list of recommended reading for National Socialists. Published in 1923, this third edition of Günther’s five-hundred-page treatise is inscribed by the book’s publisher, Julius Friedrich Lehmann, to Hitler, whom he hails as the “advanced guard in German racial thinking.”

  Along with Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, another consequential influence on the intellectual content of Mein Kampf was a German translation of The International Jew by Henry Ford. Although we no longer have Hitler’s personal copy of the two-volume translation of the infamous racist treatise, we know that Hitler owned one, as well as a portrait of its author, at least a year before he began work on Mein Kampf. “The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford,” the New York Times reported in December 1922. “In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford.”

  Ford’s book had been published earlier that year in German under the title Der Internationale Jude: Ein Weltproblem, and was an immediate sensation. “I read it and became anti-Semitic,” recalled Baldur von Schirach, the future Hitler Youth leader, who was a teenager when Ford’s book appeared. “In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy.”

  Hitler appears to have been no less affected; this is suggested not only by the portrait on his wall but also by his repeated invocation of Ford’s name. In one speech, Hitler praised Ford’s creative genius as an industrialist, calling him the “greatest” and noting that Ford was racially pure, “an absolute Northern type.” In an attack on the prominent German statesman Gustav Stresemann, Hitler offered Ford as a counterexample. “They say that Mr. Stresemann is working on a system just as Ford worked for a long time on his system,” Hitler observed. “Again I must say: Don’t compare Mr. Stresemann with Ford. Regardless of what one can say about the automobile from Ford, at least it ran while the politics of Mr. Stresemann are constantly stuck and never go anywhere.”

  Most notably, Hitler saw in Ford
a bulwark against the alleged Jewish-Bolshevik threat in America where, Hitler claimed, Jews were the “regents.” “Every year sees them emerging as the rulers of the workforce of a population of 120 million people,” Hitler observed. “A single great man, Ford, still stands there today independent, much to their anger.”

  For Hitler, Ford represented the ideal of the self-made man for his enlightened view of the common laborer. Famously, Ford doubled the wages of his workers as his profits increased. Of equal renown was Ford’s vicious and public anti-Semitism, to which he gave vent in a series of ninety-two articles published in the Dearborn Independent between 1920 and 1922. Written by two Ford associates but published in bound volumes under Ford’s name, the articles detail an alleged Jewish conspiracy that is revealed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery of Russian origin that outlines Jewish plans for world domination.

  Hitler was taken by Ford’s observation that Germany, next to the United States, was most threatened by this global plot. “Germany is today, with perhaps the possible exception of the United States, the most Jew-controlled country in the world—controlled within and from without—and a much stronger set of facts could be presented now than was presented in the original article,” Ford asserts. It notes that even though efforts had been made to reduce the Jewish presence in the government of Germany, Jews remain embedded in key aspects of German life and economy. “For their entrenchments stretched further and deeper than mere display of official power,” Ford wrote. “Their hold on the basic industries, the finances, the future of Germany has not been loosened in the least. It is there, unmovable.”

  When Ford was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that the Protocols was a forgery, he dismissed the fact, noting that it lost none of its credibility because it nevertheless described realities as they were, a blinkered logic mimicked by Hitler in Mein Kampf: “It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate,” Hitler writes of the Protocols. “The important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.”

  Clearly there were many influences in Hitler’s writing of Mein Kampf, and we will never know the exact admixture of the various things he read or heard, but there is no question that Ford’s book entered his career at an early and formative stage and impressed itself on both his thoughts and his writing, as Hitler himself stated in no uncertain terms. When a reporter asked him about the portrait prominently displayed on the wall in his office, Hitler replied in clear and simple terms, “I regard Ford as my inspiration.”

  When Hitler boasted of his education at state expense, he not only flaunted his disdain for the Bavarian penal system but also exposed his meager understanding of serious education, a fact that is revealed in Mein Kampf both in terms of its vacuous intellectual content and its painfully flawed grammar. In the surviving bits of unpublished Hitler text I found in archives across Europe and America, the collector-cum-author emerges as a half-educated man who has mastered neither basic spelling nor common grammar. His raw texts are riddled with lexical and syntactical errors. His punctuation, like his capitalization, is as faulty as it is inconsistent.

  At age thirty-five Hitler had not even mastered basic spelling. He writes “es gibt”—“there is”—phonetically rather than grammatically as “es giebt.” But the remnant pieces I studied, including Hitler’s original draft for the first chapter of Mein Kampf, as well as an eighteen-page outline to five subsequent chapters, demonstrate he took his writing seriously.

  It has long been assumed that Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his fellow prisoners, in particular his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess, and his chauffeur and bodyguard, Emil Maurice. In fact, Hitler had begun work on his manuscript before either one of them arrived in Landsberg. This first draft, typed in Pica with a faded blue ribbon, shows a fitful start to the four-hundred-page book that was to follow. A single line is typed across the top of the untitled page, “It is not by chance that my cradle,” then breaks off, drops two carriage returns, and begins anew. “It must be seen in my opinion as a positive omen that my cradle stood in Braunau since this small town lies directly on the border of two German states whose reunification we young people see as a higher goal in life,” Hitler writes with an evidently measured cadence, though he misspells higher—hohre rather than höhere—before pulling two more carriage returns and plunging into an emphatic claim that this reunification is driven not by economic considerations—“Nein! Nein!” he hammers—but by the common bond of blood. “Gemeinsames Blut gehört in ein gemeinsames Reich!” he writes. “Common blood belongs in a common empire.”

  Hitler’s working draft for the opening of Mein Kampf, written in Landsberg Prison in April 1924. Note the false start to his opening sentence, which was amended again before publication.

  At some point in these opening paragraphs, Hitler paused, took a blue pencil, and went back to make amendments, striking out his first failed sentence, making one grammatical correction, but overlooking several others. Like any author, he was clearly conscious that the opening lines of his book were among the most crucial, setting the tone and style for all that was to follow. And he evidently returned to those opening lines for further deliberation and amendment, as indicated by the version that ultimately made it into print, reflecting Hitler’s continued attempt to infuse his opening with a more expansive air of import and portent:

  It has turned out fortunate for me today that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means should be employed.

  Beyond this point, the original manuscript and the printed version parallel each other in good measure, though once again one sees Hitler’s attention to the tone and nuance of individual words. In describing his grandfather, he initially writes that he was “a poor, simple wanderer and dayworker”—Häusler and Taglöhner—but ultimately deletes the latter word from the published version. Hitler’s attentiveness to his family background is also suggested by the fact that he writes extensively about his mother and father but makes no mention of his older half-brother and half-sister, Alois and Angela, or his younger full-blood sister, Paula. The only allusion to his siblings can be found in a reference to the grief felt at “our father’s death.” Paula never forgave her brother the slight; decades later she was still complaining that her existence had been reduced to a possessive pronoun.

  Hitler appears to have worked intensely on the manuscript through July and August and into September, by which time he was approaching the end of the book—as well, he hoped, to his time in prison. Hitler’s expectations for his opus were high. From his prison window he had watched cars passing on the road and become infatuated with the idea of owning a Mercedes-Kompressor. “I saw one of them in a brochure and knew immediately, it had to be that one!” Hitler later recalled, quoting the exact price. “Twenty-six-thousand marks!”

  In mid-September, Hitler wrote to Jakob Werlin at the Benz garage, which shared the same building with the Nazi Party headquarters in Schelling Street, and ordered his dream car, preferably, Hitler said, “in gray with wire spoke wheels,” and ideally with a discount. “The problem for me is that if I am released on October 1,” Hitler explained to Werlin, “I will not be able to expect significant income from my book before mid-December, and thus I will be forced to get an advance or take out a loan from someone.” Based on the date of his preface, Hitler had the entire manuscript completed by October 16, 1924, but he was still in Landsberg.

  Hitler misjudged his release date from prison, and, once again, his publication date. He left Landsberg on December 20 with his book scheduled for publication in March 1925 and in possession of his new Mercedes, thanks to the generosity of Otto and Elsa Bruckmann.
His book would not appear until July.

  The repeated delays in publication were caused in part by Max Amann’s concern about the weak book market and the limited number of sales venues. Beyond the bookshops, beer hall rallies represented a major source for selling books. With Hitler banned from speaking in public, Amann had lost access to much of his target audience. But the main reason for the delay was the editing process. As many as seven different Hitler associates claim to have labored on the book in advance of its appearance, including Bernhard Stempfle, a Bavarian priest who edited the Miesbacher Anzeiger, a local anti-Semitic newspaper; Josef Stolzing-Cerny, the theater critic for the Völkischer Beobachter; and Adolf Müller, the owner of the printing house for Franz Eher.

  Hanfstaengl remembers battling Hitler over the first seventy pages of the manuscript, claiming to have slashed Hitler’s “worst adjectives” and his “excessive use of superlatives,” and clashed with him over various points of nuance. When Hitler wrote about his “talent” as a painter, Hanfstaengl alleges to have told him, “You cannot say this. Other people may say it, but you cannot say it yourself.” Hanfstaengl also noted “little dishonesties,” such as Hitler’s use of the term “senior civil servant” for his father. Hanfstaengl also complained of the parochial nature of Hitler’s intellect that caused him to apply a term such as world history—Weltgeschichte—to “quite minor European quarrels.” After this initial editing session, Hanfstaengl claims, Hitler never showed him any more of the manuscript.

  Rudolf Hess and his wife, Ilse, who worked for a publishing house, also remembered wrestling with Hitler over his manuscript, though with better results than Hanfstaengl. “We struggled for weeks and months with this manuscript, also with Adolf Hitler, who only slowly agreed that we were right,” Ilse recalled. The Hesses would work through the manuscript together, and then Rudolf would review the edits with Hitler line by line. Ilse described Hitler’s writing style as a form of airborne prose—Sprech-Deutsch—that contained oratorical devices that worked well in the smoke and din of a beer hall but merely cluttered the page when committed to paper: thus, also, of course, but, now, therefore. And we might add, “Nein! Nein!”