Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  As with the first two volumes of Mein Kampf, Hitler resorted to his authorial voice only when deprived of his public one. Just as volume one had been written behind prison walls, and volume two during a ban on public speaking, volume three emerged in a moment of imposed silence. For the previous two years, Hitler had worked relentlessly to establish the Nazi Party as a nationwide political force. He traveled ceaselessly, asserting his personal authority across the widespread and occasionally faltering movement, and by May 1928 he had positioned the party to participate in its first national elections. But he found himself facing a receding political tide.

  The first page from Hitler’s unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, written in summer 1928. Note how few corrections there are compared with the first manuscript page of Mein Kampf. See the illustration on page 73.

  In the more than four years since the Munich putsch, the Weimar Republic had stabilized thanks to the diplomatic acumen of its foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann. In 1924, Stresemann negotiated the Dawes Plan, lifting the crushing reparation payments that had led to the catastrophic inflation of 1923. The following year, he signed the Locarno Pact, formally recognizing the postwar western borders, and reconciling Germany with its neighbors, in particular France. The effort earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. Stresemann had cleared much of the tinder that fueled Germany’s radical right by spring 1928 when German voters went to the polls and delivered Hitler a staggering defeat. Stresemann’s party commanded a monumental 30 percent of the vote in a landscape cluttered with political movements. The right wing won a mere 26 percent of the vote. That night, in his Berlin apartment, Goebbels described the election results as “trostlos” (hopeless).

  That same evening, Hitler glossed over the debacle, observing that the Nazi Party was now the only right-wing movement in Germany. But with less than 3 percent of the national vote, the party tottered on the brink of extinction. “We will continue to work and our goal is that in a few years we will be standing there where Marxism now stands, and Marxism will be where we are today,” Hitler said. The following Wednesday, he repeated this conviction in a three-and-a-half-hour speech that, according to a police report, was only “moderately attended.” The following day, he retreated to the Obersalzberg to write his book.

  Unlike with the two preceding volumes of Mein Kampf, Hitler opened this new book—after a brief introduction in which he concedes the Nazi Party’s marginalization (“alone and isolated”) in German politics—on a decidedly philosophical note. “Politik ist werdende Geschichte,” he began, or “politics is history in the making.” “History itself is the presentation of the course of the struggle for survival of a people,” he continued. “I use the words ‘struggle for survival’ intentionally because in truth every effort to secure one’s daily bread whether in peace or war is an eternal struggle against thousands and tens of thousands of obstacles, just as life itself is an eternal battle against death.” The narrative voice is firm and direct, the script is clear and assured, with only occasional corrections. The ä key falls unevenly.

  “Human beings understand as little about why they are alive as any other beast in this world, but life is filled with the desire to preserve it. The most primitive beast could not . . .” Hitler pauses for the first time, hammers x’s across the “could not,” and begins anew. “The most primitive beast worries only about survival of the self, while the more advanced transpose this concern to wife and child, and the more advanced still to the entire race.” As examples, Hitler cites the courage a mother will show in defending her children, and the heroism of a man in protecting his people. He notes that only through this “renunciation of the individual” is the continued existence of the community possible. In order to achieve this higher state, the individual must transcend the most fundamental animal instincts: “hunger” and “love.” “That which consists of flesh and blood,” he writes, “cannot escape these laws that determine its being, and if the human spirit believes itself to be superior to this, it exterminates that basic substance that is the carrier of that spirit.” The survival of the spirit requires the continuation of the species. It is at heart the Darwinist plaint.

  Hitler then extends this paradigm for individual survival to the community—“The communal body is nothing more than the multiplicity of more or less identical individual beings”—and elevates the concept into a philosophy of foreign policy. “These same laws that determine and dominate the life of the individuals are thus also valid for a people,” he wrote. “Sustaining the self and procreation are the greatest impetus for every action, as long as the body is healthy enough to do so. The manifestation of these general rules of life will thus be as similar among peoples as they are among individuals.” Driven by the need to satiate this “eternal hunger” and this unquenchable desire to reproduce, the myriad species of our planet thus find themselves locked in an eternal Lebenskampf, a struggle for survival.

  Invoking the concept of Weltgeschichte in the most expansive terms possible—with none of the niggling “European quarrels” of which Hanfstaengl complained—Hitler traces the “struggle for existence” to the very origins of our world. He speaks of a geologic Weltgeschichte before mankind, when there raged a “battle among the forces of nature” that separated land from sea and forged mountains and plains and oceans, and from which emerged the first forms of organic life, “whose development is marked by an eternal battle of man against animal and even against man.” From this battle within the human species has emerged races, tribes, peoples, and eventually nations, an observation that brings Hitler back to his opening thesis. “But if politics is history in the making, and history itself is the depiction of the struggle of men and peoples for survival and procreation,” he writes, “then in truth politics is thus the implementation of the life struggle of a people.” For Hitler, politics is nothing more—to turn the Clausewitzian maxim—than war in its most refined form. For Hitler politics is the “art” of the struggle for life.

  In these opening pages there is none of the emotionalism and personal confession we find in volume one, or the party-specific details of volume two. Here the tone is notably measured, thoughtful, analytical. We find Hitler articulating his views on existence more thoroughly and completely than anywhere else in his published writings, speeches, or monologues. We see him seeking to stitch together his eclectic accumulated knowledge into a philosophical framework, straining for profundity in an odd patchwork that seems to have been cut from the cloth of the likes of Charles Darwin and Max Weber. As usual, Hitler presents his ideas with only meager reference to sources, leaving scholars to speculate with varying certitude on the origins of his ideas, whether they derive from intense and extensive reading or from rummaging through secondary sources and boulevard newspapers. With the two volumes of Mein Kampf, which were written over extended periods of time and subjected to repeated editing, we are left to speculate on sources for both their form and content. For Hitler’s third book, we know the exact weeks during which it was written and have one of the books we know served as a model.

  Six weeks before Hitler began work on his new book project, he celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday. Among the gifts he received was a 105-page hardcover, Fichte’s German Belief, written by Maria Grunewald and inscribed to “the revered Führer” by Theodor Lühr, the husband of Maria Lühr, a master bookbinder with a studio on Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm. Bound in forest-green linen with the title and name of the author embossed in gold Gothic script, Fichte’s German Belief contains a series of lithographs of Aryan maidens and struggling warriors with titles such as “On Beauty” and “Gods of Light Battling the Forces of Darkness.” The text itself deals with Fichte’s spiritual essays, and though there is no marginalia or other traces of Hitler’s intrusion, we find Maria Grunewald’s intellectual fingerprints in the pages of Hitler’s manuscript.

  In explicating Fichte’s philosophy of the role of the individual in society, Grunewald identifies a three-stage development: the “lowest
form of a personality” is completely self-absorbed, and thinks only of itself; at the next stage of development, an individual extends this concern to the family—the way, for example, a man protects his wife and children; the most elevated personality transcends immediate concerns and extends itself to the “community.” As Hitler framed his ideas for his book, Grunewald’s words appear to have echoed in his mind and ultimately found their way onto the page. But while Grunewald, in interpreting Fichte, sees this evolution transcending the material world into the spiritual realm and ultimately into a union with God, Hitler detours into the ruthless ethic of social Darwinism. To this point, Hitler’s measured pace and progressive logic dissipate into two hundred pages of rambling foreign policy objectives, with particular emphasis on German minorities in northern Italy, spiked with a beer hall–style rant about Jewish and Bolshevik conspiracies before returning to the Clausewitzian axiom with the Hitlerian twist: “It is the responsibility of politics to fight for the existence of a people and in order to do this it must use whatever weapons seem most appropriate, so that life is best served,” Hitler concludes. “One does not engage in politics in order to die, rather one allows people to die on occasion, so that a people can live.”

  Hitler must have finished the manuscript by the second weekend in July—234 pages in six weeks—for on Monday, July 13, he traveled to Munich, where he gave a speech, then continued on to Berlin, where he gave two more speeches, addressing the issue of ethnic Germans in northern Italy and quoting extensively from his manuscript. The following Monday, his sister Angela and niece Geli joined him, and in the company of Goebbels, who had just completed the finishing touches on his novel, Michael, the party traveled to Helgoland for a week’s vacation on the North Sea. Max Amann returned to Munich with a carbon copy of the Hitler manuscript and locked it in the safe at 11 Thiersch Street, where it was to remain for the next seventeen years.

  Hitler’s renewed political activity may have caused him to abandon the book or to sequester it. But it’s also possible that there was a commercial consideration. After an initial flurry of interest following the release of Mein Kampf in the summer of 1925, sales plummeted. In 1927, volume one sold fewer than five thousand copies, and volume two a paltry twelve hundred. In 1928, Amann may have been reluctant to enter a sluggish market with yet another Hitler book. Hitler himself may also have recognized the inherent flaws in the book’s eclectic and haphazard structure or possibly his limitations as a writer. “What beautiful Italian Mussolini speaks and writes,” Hitler said to his personal lawyer and later gauleiter Hans Frank. “I am not capable of doing that in German. I just cannot keep my thoughts together when I am writing.” In comparison with Mussolini’s work, Hitler observed, Mein Kampf appeared to be an exercise in fantasizing “behind bars,” little more than a “series of feature articles for the Völkischer Beobachter.” “Ich bin kein Schriftsteller,” Hitler told Frank. “I am not a writer.”

  For Hitler, however, this epiphany did not constitute a creative or existential crisis, an admission of failure, or a nod to ruined ambition. It was merely a statement of fact. He was, in essence, as he repeatedly said, a man of deeds, not words. He recognized not only his limitations as a writer but also the inherent liabilities of the written word. As he told Frank, “If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book.”

  He expressed a similar sentiment about his unpublished manuscript. “I’m certainly glad this volume hasn’t been published,” Hitler told Ernst Hanfstaengl in the mid-1930s. “What political complications it would make for me at the moment.” He noted that Amann had offered him a million-mark advance and that millions more would follow in royalties. As tempting as the prospects were, Hitler felt the political liabilities were too great. “Perhaps later, when I’m further along,” he said. “Now it’s impossible.” Within a year of completing what was to become Target No. 589, Hitler saw his political prospects, so grim in the summer of 1928, change dramatically. On October 3, 1929, Gustav Stresemann suffered a massive heart attack. Three weeks later, the New York stock market collapsed, and with it the German economy. Hitler’s popularity soared. No longer idled by political marginalization, Hitler abandoned book writing. In three brief years, he would be chancellor of Germany.

  * * *

  1 The book was returned on October 4, 1991, by Breitenbach’s widow along with a second Hitler book taken by her husband, a 1933 edition of Reflections on World History by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt. This latter volume bears an inscription from Elsa Bruckmann to “my friend and Führer” with the date December 24, 1934.

  2 The files in the Library of Congress contain an adventurous account of Hans Beilhack’s vain attempt to locate the original manuscript.

  3 In his diary entry for October 14, 1925, Goebbels had, in fact, nothing but praise for Mein Kampf. “I will finish reading Hitler’s book tonight,” he writes. “Absolutely fascinating! Who is this man? Half plebeian, half god!”

  4 Hitler also published a monograph on foreign policy, extracted from volume two of Mein Kampf, regarding South Tirol, a portion of northern Italy inhabited by a large population of ethnic Germans.

  BOOK FOUR

  An American Bible

  The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony, and owing to current ignorance of the physical basis of race, one often hears the statement made that native Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin. This is not true. At the time of the Revolutionary War the settlers in the thirteen Colonies were not only purely Nordic, but also purely Teutonic, a very large majority being Anglo-Saxon in the most limited meaning of that term.

  MADISON GRANT, The Passing of the Great Race, 1916

  The American Union has nevertheless fused people of diverse nationalities together. Except that on closer examination it appears that the overwhelming majority of these diverse nationalities belong to the same or at least related basic racial elements.

  ADOLF HITLER, unpublished manuscript, 1928

  FEW SURVIVING BOOKS in Hitler’s library had as clear or measurable an impact on Hitler’s thinking, and ultimately on his actions, as the 1925 German translation of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. This handsome tome, hardbound in yellow linen with the title in brown letters, is relatively short, less than two hundred pages divided into twenty-eight chapters, each no more than a few pages, with signpost titles that provide the specific content—“The Physical Basis of Race,” “Race and Habitat,” “Competition Among the Races,” “Race and Language,” “The Nordic Fatherland,” “The Racial Aptitudes”—supported by alleged empirical scientific methodologies, such as the “cephalic index,” which uses skull shape for determining racial origins—“long skulled” for Teutonic Nordics and “round skulled” for the Alpines—and illustrated with maps that track the five-thousand-year expansion, contraction, and fusion of diverse racial groups from the Bronze Age to the present day. Unlike the maps in the original English-language edition, which are rendered in muted green, yellow, and red pastels, the German edition contains black-and-white images with arrows, shading, and crossed lines illustrating the various population shifts.

  The map indicating the “Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic Nordics” between 1800–100 b.c., for example, shows the “Scandinavian and Teutonic” populations of northern Europe penetrating the region of the “Continental Nordics” in a series of finger-like protrusions. The “Continental Nordics,” in turn, press south and east into the territories of the “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans,” with a series of arrows tracking further expansion into present-day Spain, Italy, and Greece, and beyond the Black Sea and Caspian Sea into Persia. An inset map in the upper right-hand corner shows subsequent expansions into India, Tibet, and Mongolia.

  As the book’s ominous title and the accompanying illustrations suggest, the European continent, along with much of the rest of the E
urasian landmass, had been invaded and dominated by the Nordic race for several millennia before giving way to or being absorbed by other racial groups. There were important lessons from history to be learned here. With the “great race” in decline, resolute action needed to be taken. Demographic borders had to be defined and the race itself purified. Grant was explicit in regard to the latter. “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life, tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community,” Grant wrote. “The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

  Cover page from Hitler’s copy of Madisom Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History

  In his book, Grant combined the precepts of social Darwinism and racial stereotyping common at the time in the emerging field of eugenics with demography and history, creating a unique but spurious theory of racial development. In pursuit of this end, Grant indulged in sweeping generalizations, availed himself of selective history, drew on dubious scientific methods and data, and framed it all with an emphatic, single-minded, merciless, and unapologetically racist message. It was exactly the sort of intellectual posture that appealed to Hitler. It also opened Hitler’s eyes to new perspectives.

  By the time Hitler began writing Mein Kampf, he had developed, as he noted, a full-framed ideological vision based not only on his “four-and-a-half year battle against lies, stupidity, and cowardice,” but also his experience in his childhood home, on the battlefield, and in the Munich beer halls, as well as the insights he had gained under the tutelage of Dietrich Eckart. Thus, the books that helped inform the content of his vision, be it Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, or any number of other works whose ideas found their way into the pages of Mein Kampf, were merely “pieces,” to borrow Hitler’s own metaphor, in the “mosaic” of his preconceived ideological framework. But Grant’s book was different.