Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  We will never know with certainty the degree to which these various editorial claims are justified, since the vast majority of the working drafts have vanished.2 What does come through in these various accounts, however, is the sense of ownership Hitler felt for his text, the attention he gave to the tone and content of his book, and the stubbornness he demonstrated in seeking to retain his distinctive authorial voice.

  One editorial change that can be credited to a particular individual, and certainly represents the most consequential in the yearlong editing process, was that made by Max Amann when he distilled Hitler’s original title to the leaner and pithier Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

  When Hitler’s book appeared in July 1925 it was greeted almost unanimously with scathing reviews. The Frankfurter Zeitung described Mein Kampf as an act of political suicide and headlined its review “Hitler’s End.” A Berlin newspaper expressed “partial doubts about the mental stability of the writer.” One critic observed that Hitler “settled accounts” with everyone except himself.

  Even the radical right was hard put to say something positive. Gen. Erich Ludendorff was offended by Hitler’s seething anti-Semitism and distanced himself from both book and author. Alfred Rosenberg, author of virtually impenetrable prose who spent nearly a decade getting The Myth of the Twentieth Century written and published, offered the glancing observation that the book appeared to be “quickly written.” The Bayerische Vaterland (Bavarian Fatherland) called it “Sein Krampf”(His Cramp). In some circles, the book became the butt of jokes.

  One Nazi Party leader, Otto Strasser, claimed that when he quoted entire passages verbatim from Mein Kampf during an informal gathering of Nazi Party leaders at the 1927 Nuremberg rally, he evoked expressions of astonishment from his cohorts. Only after he confessed that he had not actually read the book but only memorized select passages did a round of similar confessions ensue. “General laughter broke out, and it was decided that the first person who came and claimed that he had read Mein Kampf had to pay the tab for everyone,” Strasser recalled. The first to appear was Strasser’s older brother, Gregor, who “answered with a sonorous ‘No.’ Goebbels shook his head. Göring broke out in a loud laugh.”3 Though the anecdote belongs to the lore generated by disaffected associates—Otto Strasser fled to Canada in 1933; Gregor was murdered the following year—it does convey an enduring and generally acknowledged truth: the general unreadability of Hitler’s book.

  Despite the unflattering reviews, and the book’s evident deficiencs, Hitler’s pride of authorship is preserved in the numerous copies of Mein Kampf inscribed to family, friends, and associates. Alois Hitler remembered receiving a copy, as did Paula and Hitler’s former landlord, Josef Popp, whose copy was inscribed “for old time’s sake.” Emil Maurice, Hitler’s chauffeur and bodyguard, received the tenth numbered copy of Mein Kampf with a signed inscription from Hitler, “To my loyal and brave shield bearer.” For Christmas that year, Hitler sent Goebbels one of the five hundred numbered editions as an expression of appreciation, “For your exemplary method of battle.” Hitler continued to inscribe copies of Mein Kampf for years to come. I have come across various inscribed editions of Mein Kampf in private collections, including three different editions in the Harvard University Rare Book Library with dedications from Hitler, including one of the original collector editions—Number 144—autographed by Hitler as late as November 1942.

  Hitler’s satisfaction with his first book is most convincingly demonstrated in his decision to write a sequel. By the time Mein Kampf appeared in July 1925, he was hard at work on volume two. That spring, Hitler rented quarters on the Obersalzberg, an alpine peak overlooking Berchtesgaden, where he had met with Dietrich Eckart in the months before the Beer Hall Putsch, and set to work in a small hut that became known as the Kampfhäusl, or “Battle Hut,” whose ruins can be found in a dense thicket of trees. Hitler returned in the summer of 1926 to complete the manuscript, this time taking a room at the Hotel Deutsches Haus, in Berchtesgaden.

  “Here I was really spoiled,” he remembered. “Every day I would walk up to the Obersalzberg, to the Scharitzkehl, and then down again, two-and-a-half hours. Down below I wrote the second volume.” His first book had been primarily autobiographical. The second was purely political, four hundred pages in which Hitler outlines his vision for Germany, writing about the need for Lebensraum (living space) for the German people, about the infrangible bond of “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil), and, most notably, about the danger of the Jews. “If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: Twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.”

  Hitler finished the manuscript in August 1926, with a dedication to Dietrich Eckart, “who devoted his life to the awakening of his, our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds.” Then he turned to a writing project that he had begun considering the previous spring: a book-length memoir of the First World War.

  Hitler’s decision to devote his next literary endeavor to his wartime service is remarkable not only because it appears to have been overlooked by most Hitler biographers but also because it represented for Hitler a conscious turning away not just from political writing but also from the Nazi Party, and away from Franz Eher as his publisher. As Otto Bruckmann said, Hitler did this “in the hope of reaching above and beyond the Party with this unpolitical book.” It was Hitler’s most explicit expression of interest in being a real writer.

  Hitler was almost certainly motivated by a number of factors. For all his aspirations for Mein Kampf, not to mention his investment of time and energy in the writing and editing process, the book had done only moderately well, barely selling out its first printing in a year—respectable given the market conditions but hardly commensurate with his inflated ambitions. His expectations for the second volume were certainly more sober. Indeed, while volume one was met with derision and contempt by reviewers, volume two was simply ignored—not only by critics, but by readers, too. It sold fewer than seven hundred copies after a year on the market.

  But there were lessons to be learned from his initial experience as an author. Those newspapers that had published excerpts from volume one invariably selected his account of his time at the front, which seemed to resonate. As for Franz Eher, it was clear to Hitler that it was a regional publisher with little access to the market beyond Bavaria. So in the spring of 1926, while he was in the midst of the second volume of Mein Kampf, he began talking with Otto and Elsa Bruckmann about his next book project. As the publisher of Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which by then was in its seventeenth printing, Bruckmann had both conservative credentials and access to the broader reading public.

  At the same time, Hitler was immersing himself in World War I literature, inspired in part by Ernst Jünger’s Blood and Steel, which the author had sent to him earlier in the year, with a personal inscription: “To the national Führer Adolf Hitler.” Jünger’s three previous books—Storm of Steel, War as Inner Experience, and Copse 125, in which a German unit is obliterated in a heroic effort to hold their position in a small stand of trees—had established the veteran as the most prominent voice of the frontline soldier. In contrast to the flood of pacifist literature, which would find its consummate expression a few years later in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Jünger’s books glorified the German soldier and his sacrifices for the Fatherland, finding grace and nobility amid the carnage. Hitler apparently imbibed Jünger vigorously that spring. “I have read all your writings,” he wrote the author that May. “In them I have come to value one of the few powerful conveyors of the frontline experience.”

  Throughout the summer of 1926, Hitler seems to
have been contemplating his own war memoir, for within a month of completing the second volume of Mein Kampf in August 1927, he spoke with Elsa Bruckmann about his vision for his next book. “He is already reflecting on the form of his war book, and says it is becoming more vivid and alive in him,” Bruckmann wrote to her husband on September 26. “The images are crystallizing around the core which he has conceived and are demanding to be completed.” By December, Hitler’s war memoir had progressed to the point where Bruckmann had already set a publication date. When Alfred Rosenberg approached him about publishing a recently completed manuscript, Bruckmann declined the offer with the explanation that “in the spring I am going to be publishing Hitler’s war memoirs.” But Hitler never delivered the book. Like most of the typescript to Mein Kampf, no manuscript has ever been found.

  Hitler read this copy of Ernest Jünger’s Fire and Blood in early 1926 while preparing to write his own memoir of his time at the front.

  Nevertheless, we can make some informed conjectures about its form and content, not only from descriptions in Mein Kampf of battles, but also from the photostats of cards and letters Hitler sent to a Munich friend, Ernst Hepp, that preserve in a tight but even hand the emotions of his baptism by fire as a twenty-six-year-old: the midnight march beneath a star-filled sky, listening to the distant thunder of artillery, the rising tension as the incoming shells fall ever closer, and the gnawing uncertainty of the enfolding clamor, followed by the sudden thrilling release of attack on an enemy emplacement where British soldiers “swarm like ants” from their dugouts. “We run forward like lightning over the fields and after repeated bloody one-to-one clashes throw the chaps from one trench after another,” the young Hitler reports. “Many raise their hands. Whoever doesn’t surrender is gunned down. And so we clear trench after trench.”

  In the spring of 1926, Hitler was reminded of these moments in the pages of Jünger’s battlefront memoirs, with their near-identical descriptions of nocturnal marches, distant artillery barrages, and the emotional surges that came with the rush into battle. Jünger not only awakened wartime memories and familiar emotions but also inspired emulation, as suggested by Hitler’s book negotiations with the Bruckmanns that spring and by the passages I found that Hitler had highlighted in his copy of Fire and Blood.

  In the 190-page hardcover, there are repeated penciled intrusions, extended lines beside individual sentences, and paragraphs frequently trailing off in a series of staccato dashes that seem to complement the sporadic rattle of machine-gun fire depicted in these pages. In these penciled marks we can see Hitler following Jünger’s reflections and commentaries about the transformative effects of war. Like Jünger, Hitler had experienced the carnage as something ennobling and transformative. “But this is one of the inexplicable riddles that the battlefield constantly poses to us and with which we will continue to occupy ourselves for some time, if we happen to survive,” Jünger muses on page 86, with Hitler attentively following with his pencil. “And that is this unflinching dignified composure that a man reveals when confronted by his own extermination, and that we in our paltry everyday existence cannot even begin to imagine.”

  In paging through this slender volume, I observed that Hitler focused his attention on Jünger’s explorations of the emotional and spiritual aspects of war, overlooking the descriptions of battle, except in two places, at the top of page 106 and the bottom of page 107, where he marked passages that recall an artillery barrage where “the throttling concussion of the explosions” becomes so intense that everything begins to “shiver and dance like images in a flickering movie.” Jünger is paralyzed with sensory overload. “I no longer hear the bombardment, it has transcended the point where it is even possible to hear.” Beside these passages Hitler has drawn a penciled line.

  Hitler has marked a passage in Jünger’s memoir Fire and Blood describing how men react when faced with “extermination” (Vernichtung).

  Mostly, though, his pencil traces Jünger’s frontline epiphanies about the transformative effects of slaughter, about the hardening of the heart and soul, of the forging of the human spirit into something “hard and merciless,” about the bonding experience of men rushing forward into battle, about the fusion of human life and the state apparatus into the expression of the collective will of a people, about a world beyond all known “borders of human values,” where “courage, fear, sympathy—all that no longer exists”—meld to the point where the human will first “speaks through fire, then speaks through blood.”

  Hitler’s pencil follows these articulations in a single-line concurrence with one exception: on page 26, beside a passage in which Jünger speculates on the power of the human will in the face of the “kinetic force” of “monstrous mass production.” “The battle is a horrific measuring of competing production,” Jünger writes, “and victory is the success of the opponent who knows how best to produce less expensively, more efficiently and the most quickly.” Beside this passage Hitler has planted a single question mark, an apparent challenge to Jünger, and an intimation of calamitous calculations to be made on the future battlefields of Europe.

  Given what we know from all this, we can only speculate on the dimensions, tone, and direction of Hitler’s missing war memoir. Perhaps it was never completed, most likely because it fell victim to Hitler’s political career. By 1927, the speaking ban that had prevented Hitler from making public appearances had been lifted in most German states, allowing him to renew his political activity. As he wrote in his letter to Siegfried Wagner, and underscored in his preface to Mein Kampf, he was a man of the political act not the written word.

  Most likely whatever existed of the manuscript was burned along with most of Hitler’s personal papers in the spring of 1945, when he dispatched his adjutant, Julius Schaub, first to his Munich apartment to gather his private papers, then to his residence on the Obersalzberg to collect the rest, and incinerate them. Christa Schröder, one of Hitler’s secretaries, was witness to the event and recalls that Schaub first cleared the strongbox in Hitler’s second-floor library, then piled diverse letters, files, manuscripts, and books beside the flagpole and “with the assistance of a few canisters of petrol” set the heap of papers ablaze, erasing much of Hitler’s private life—but not everything. What Hitler had forgotten, and Schaub could not have known, is that fifteen years earlier, Hitler had placed a carbon copy of his fourth writing project in a strongbox at the Eher Verlag offices in downtown Munich.

  The two-inch stack of yellowed paper is a carbon copy of a 324-page typewritten manuscript. Time has gnawed the margins of individual pages. In places, entire words have fallen away. At some point, water penetrated the manuscript on pages 18 through 22, giving rise to mildew, which ingested entire tracts of thought.

  An accompanying memorandum, identifying the original location of the manuscript at Thiersch Street 11, reads:

  Joseph Berg, who lives at 35 Scheubner Richter Strasse, Munich, and was technical manager of this publication house, gave us a manuscript of an alleged unpublished work by Adolf Hitler. It was written over 15 years ago and locked up in a safe. Mr. Berg had strictest orders that the manuscript could neither be printed nor shown to anybody.

  The memorandum is signed by Capt. Paul M. Leake of the Army Signal Corps, and identifies the manuscript as “Target No. 589.” With Target No. 589, we not only have our only complete working draft of a book manuscript by Adolf Hitler but also possess a document that preserves his development as an author. By the summer of 1928, the thirty-nine-year-old writer had four years of writing, editing, and publishing experience behind him. There is confidence both in style and form, with none of the waffling and second-guessing we find in his first draft of Mein Kampf. When editorial changes are made, they are clearly intended to intensify the prose, to inject greater compression or authority, with an acute ear for nuance. In one case, the plaintive subjunctive “I would like” (ich möchte) is replaced with the more deliberate “I want” (ich will). In another, the “amount of
force” (Machtgehalt) is replaced by the “use of force” (Machteinsatz). Other changes are stylistic in nature. A syntactical misstep is corrected on page 5, where “eternal hunger” is initially “fulfilled,” then replaced by “satiated.” On page 19, “to possess courage” is given greater emotive power with the phrase “to carry courage in one’s heart.” On page 20, one passage is given entirely new meaning when “biological transformation” is recast as “geological transformation.” A reference to “artificial restructuring” becomes “sudden restructuring,” and in another passage, circumstances are “determined” rather than “influenced.”

  In these raw manuscript pages, we see the author’s mind at work, processing information, wrestling with his ideas, watching his words appear on the page, gauging style and nuance, occasionally tripping over grammar and syntax, making a quick typed correction, then pressing forward in a relentless torrent of prose. In his opening sentence he writes: “In August 1925, while writing the second volume [of Mein Kampf ], I laid out the fundamental thoughts for a German National Socialist foreign policy though in somewhat abbreviated form.” Hitler says he intends in this book to provide a more detailed vision for Germany’s role in the world, in effect, transforming Mein Kampf into an integrated trilogy: volume one focusing on Hitler and the Nazi movement, volume two exploring the Nazi Party and Germany, and volume three contextualizing Germany in the world.4 This marked a return to political writing and to Franz Eher as his publisher.