Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  With The Passing of the Great Race, Hitler encountered a book that compelled him to frame his vision of race beyond the borders of Germany, even the borders predating the truncations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to think not only geographically but also temporally, and not merely in decades but in centuries and even millennia. Grant demonstrated to Hitler that the dynamics of human populations represented a force more powerful than any single political leader, any single government, any political or military alliance regardless of its size or power. This was the Grant epiphany, the intersection between the two inexorable forces of time and demography. The implications—moral, political, historical—when taken to their extreme limit were both profound and deeply unsettling.

  Hitler’s copy of The Passing of the Great Race is a 1925 German translation of the English original first published in 1916 by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York as a contribution to America’s emerging field of eugenics. It was intended, as Madison Grant made explicitly clear, to be a clarion call to Americans to stanch the flow of immigrants who, he claimed, were not only eroding the Nordic foundations on which America had been built but undermining the very values conceived by America’s Founding Fathers and enshrined within the Declaration of Independence.

  “The men who wrote the words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ were themselves the owners of slaves, and despised Indians as something less than human,” Grant observed. “Equality in their minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea. The words ‘that all men are created equal’ have since been subtly falsified by adding the word ‘free,’ although no such expression is found in the original document, and the teachings based on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and amaze the men who formulated the Declaration.” Grant asserted that America had been conceived and defended as a nation of Nordic people, and that the successive waves of immigrants, from the Mediterranean littoral and the famine-ridden countryside of Ireland to the ghettos of Eastern Europe were as foreign to the vision of the Founding Fathers as were the millions of former slaves and their offspring.

  “Thus the view that the negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun, and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period,” Grant claimed, “and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man.” He cautions that one will have the same experience “with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.” Grant provided a broadside of racist sentiment as vicious and potent as anything Hitler had found in his readings in the National Socialist Institute in Munich, or had heard from Dietrich Eckart in their endless tutorials, or, for that matter, screamed into the beer halls of Munich. Here Hitler found unbridled racist sentiment to equal anything he could muster, advanced by a man who was a graduate of Yale with a law degree from Columbia and had been assigned by the U.S. government to determine its quotas on foreign immigration. Grant had also been instrumental in promoting eugenic legislation in the states of Virginia and California. But Grant had even greater concerns, as the ominous title of his book suggests: the welfare of the Nordic race at large.

  A good portion of the book, easily three-quarters in fact, is devoted to exploring “the racial basis of European history” and, in particular, the significant role that the Nordic race had played in shaping the course of world history. The pure Nordics, blond-haired and blue-eyed and of imposing stature, had originated in Scandinavia and gradually extended their reach across the European continent and beyond, sparking as they went brief flourishes among the various civilizations before being absorbed into the broad mass of racially inferior peoples. Grant credits the Nordic race with successive moments of human achievement, from ancient Greece to the “marvelous organization” of the Roman Empire, to Persia, to India, and beyond. “From 525 to 485 b.c., during the reign of Darius, whose sculptured portraits show a man of pure Nordic type,” Grant claims, “the tall, blond Persians had become almost exclusively a class of great ruling nobles.” Grant even glimpses traces of Nordic influences in ancient China. “References in Chinese annals to the green eyes of the Wu-suns or Hiung-Nu in central Asia,” he writes, “are the only sure evidence we have of the Nordic race in contact with the peoples of eastern Asia.”

  In a paradoxical twist to the Darwinian model, Grant describes a process in which the “superior race” triumphs over an “inferior people” only to fall victim to a multigenerational process of racial transformation during which the “superior race” is gradually diluted and absorbed into the “inferior race.” Grant asserts that this centuries-long process of racial fusion accounts for the rise and fall of empires and civilizations across the Eurasian continent and parallels the penetration and absorption of the Nordic populations.

  Grant laments, in particular, the depletion of Nordic stock within Europe, citing the example of the Holy Roman Empire, which was in fact neither holy nor Roman, and represented the centuries-long German domination of much of Europe. “Europe was the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire was Europe, predominantly, until the Thirty Years’ War,” Grant claims, noting that this war that raged between 1618 and 1648 eradicated much of Europe’s German-speaking Nordic stock. “Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled,” Grant observes, “while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Wurtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man, and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood.” He observes that the inferior races from the south and east replaced the decimated Nordic population. “This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature, and skull characters,” Grant concludes. “The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause.”

  This map from Hitler’s copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race shows the expansion of the Nordic peoples across Europe between 1800 and 100 B.C. The inset indicates further penetrations in Asia.

  In a similar vein, Grant, who was writing The Passing of the Great Race in the midst of the First World War, laments the wholesale slaughter of Nordic stock on the battlefields of northern France. “From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war, and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this race,” Grant writes. “It is the same old story of mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics, just as the Nordic nobility of Renaissance Italy seem to have been possessed with a blood mania to kill one another off. It is the modern edition of the old berserker blood rage, and is class suicide on a gigantic scale.” According to Grant, history taught that the qualities of courage and leadership that had distinguished the Nordic race in war and conquest across the millennia were ultimately leading to ruin through the depletion of Nordic stock in battle and the inevitable absorption of the survivors through the numerically superior but racially inferior populations of the conquered peoples.

  Though Grant intended his book, which had consequential impact on American immigration and eugenics legislation during the 1920s, to advance his own racist agenda within the United States, its message resonated powerfully in translation. Grant’s book appears to have made a deep impression on Hitler as evidenced in Hitler’s speeches
and writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several concluding paragraphs of Grant’s book are worth citing in their entirety for the insights they provide, not only into Grant’s distorted views of history and their impact on American legislation, but also the lessons they provided to the aspiring political leader of the revived National Socialist movement who not only read and absorbed these conclusions but went on to embed them in the political, social, and military agenda he was to implement following his seizure of power.

  In concluding this revision of the racial foundations upon which the history of Europe has been based, it is scarcely necessary to point out that the actual results of the spectacular conquests and invasions of history have been far less permanent than those of the more insidious victories arising from the crossing of two diverse races, and that in such mixtures the relative prepotency of the various human subspecies in Europe appears to be in inverse ratio to their social value.

  The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers, a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur, and our present reliance on the influences of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.

  We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed, or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.

  We do not know exactly when Hitler came into the possession of The Passing of the Great Race, which was published in German translation by the Julius Lehmann Verlag in 1925—the copy in the Library of Congress is a fourth edition and contains no marginalia—but it is evident that Hitler was familiar with Grant’s theories of race and history while writing his first volume of Mein Kampf. In the chapter “Nation and Race,” Hitler reflected on the rise and fall of empires and attributed the process to the relative “purity of the blood” of the dominant race. “Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures,” Hitler wrote, “for men do not perish as a result of lost wars but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood.” Hitler observed that all “occurrences of world history” are little more than “an expression of the races’ instinct of self-preservation.”

  In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant had underscored the advantages of racial purity by contrasting the achievements of the North Americans with those of their neighbors to the south. “What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican,” Grant wrote, “and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self government. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.” Echoing Grant, Hitler drew on the comparative American experiences. “North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements has mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America,” Hitler observed, “where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood.”

  We cannot be certain of the exact sources of Hitler’s familiarity with Grant’s theories. These could have come through secondary channels, such as German writers like Hans F. K. Günther, who references Grant in his own writings, or possibly through Grant’s book itself, which was published in German while he was completing his manuscript in the late autumn of 1924 or early 1925. In any event, Hitler’s embrace of Grant’s work was noticeably selective, as demonstrated by his preference for the term “Aryan” over “Nordic.” Although the concepts were frequently used synonymously in the 1920s, each term had a distinctive provenance and resonance, with “Aryan” based on linguistic roots and enveloped in a semimythic aura, and “Nordic” defined by distinct physiological features and geographic areas. Hitler used the term “Aryan” almost exclusively in Mein Kampf. Grant dismissed it out of hand. “Historians and philologists have approached the subject from the viewpoint of linguistics,” he wrote, “and as a result we have been burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the Caucasian, and perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the ‘Celtic’ race.”

  Hitler never let science, even bad science, get in the way of ideology, especially when it could be wedged into the framework of his preconceived ideological-intellectual “mosaic” or exploited for political purposes. According to the historian Gerhard Weinberg, Hitler’s public declarations about the restrictive immigration policy in the United States were intended as a critique of the open policies of the Weimar Republic. Weinberg notes that Hitler was exceedingly calculating in his pronouncements on America, “mixing open expressions of his views with deception to suit the occasion.”

  But with The Passing of the Great Race Hitler had encountered a book that was more than a source for political exploitation. He sensed that he had encountered an idea that offered profound insights into historical processes that were just beginning to be fathomed, as he informed a small gathering of 180 Nazi Party officials in the spring of 1925. “We have no historical research that places value on the significance of human races for the destinies of peoples,” Hitler observed at the June 12 gathering. “We need an understanding of history that views history as not just one battle after another but penetrates into the racial motivations for conquest.” Hitler insisted that one needed to understand the motivations and forces, the racial drives—rassische Triebe—that characterized individual racial groups and that ultimately represented the fundamental force that shaped the world. “Then history will no longer be a collection of completely incomprehensible things, but rather it should make the incomprehensible comprehensible for us,” he said. “Dann kommt die neue Weltanschauung!” he proclaimed. We will have a new understanding of the world.

  That same summer, while working on the second volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler returned to the issue of race in the chapter dealing with the nature of the state. At one point, when discussing the immutability of racial character, Hitler repeated Grant’s assertion about the impossibility of assimilating the “Negroid” race into the Nordic culture. Hitler wrote that “it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language in the future and perhaps even give his vote to a German political party.” Like Grant, Hitler went on to cite the Jews from Eastern Europe as another case of a racial group that by nature must necessarily remain foreign. Hitler insisted that even if they spoke German and laid claim to German nationality, they would never be truly German.

  In discussing the racial composition of the Germans themselves, Hitler conceded that German nationality was “no longer based on a unified racial nucleus,” and like Grant, traced the cause back to the seventeenth century when the Thirty Years’ War had decimated the German population. Hitler wrote of “the poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people, especially since
the Thirty Years’ War,” leading “not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.” Hitler observed that “the open borders of our fatherland” had led to the encroachment of “un-German foreign bodies along these frontier districts.” He also observed “the strong and continuous influx of foreign blood into the interior of the Reich itself.” “Not only are the basic racial elements scattered territorially, but on a small scale within the same territory,” Hitler wrote. “Beside Nordic men Easterners, beside Easterners Dinarics, beside both of these Westerners, and mixtures in between.”

  Hitler’s most explicit nod to Madison Grant comes in a passage in which he hails America’s Immigration Act of 1924 of which Grant was a strong advocate. “There is today one State in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable,” Hitler wrote. “Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union, in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigration on principle to elements in poor health, by simple excluding certain races from nationalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the folkish state concept.”

  In the spring of 1927, Hitler referenced Grant himself in a speech, citing his work and its impact on American policies. “On the basis of the work of an American scholar, who proved that Germany barely counted between nine to nineteen million truly Nordic-Aryan population,” Hitler noted on April 6, “the American Union set immigration quotas. It gave preference to populations from Scandinavian countries, from England and Ireland, and only in third place from Germany because it was already racially inferior.” Unlike Germany, Hitler noted, “that particular union does not permit that every Polish Jew can come in, but instead it selects its people.”