Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Hitler’s speeches in these years echo with allusions to Grant. At a gathering of seven thousand Nazi Party members in Weimar on July 4, 1926, Hitler placed the Madison Grant thesis of the Nordic race as a driving force in world history within the context of the colonization of America. “Across the centuries the German farmer migrated to the other world as colonizer, as fertilizer for other people, as fertilizer of culture for other nations,” he observed. “Thus he began to conquer the great continent.” But what was a gain for the new world represented a loss for the German people, especially during the Great War when German blood found itself slaughtering German blood. In words that infused Grant’s complaint about the Nordics’ “mutual butchery” with nationalist bias, Hitler recalled the tragic confrontation with American soldiers in the trenches of northern France. “All that powerful human material that we saw on the American side during the World War,” he recalled. “Believe me, German mothers had once given birth to these men, German fathers once sired them, and then fate determined that in less than fifty or even twenty years or even less, they confronted us as our enemies in a struggle for survival for our very existence. This is the horrible curse of the most recent political process.”

  A year later, Hitler was still brooding over the United States as a failed investment for the Germans. In a speech delivered on March 26, 1927, Hitler availed himself of the historic myth that the United States would have become a German-speaking nation but for a single vote. “When it was to be decided in North America which national language was to be introduced, it came down to a single vote, and a single vote decided that German should not be introduced as the national language but rather English,” he explained. “We lost a continent of 120 million to which we had dispatched the most valuable human material, as was proven in the year 1917.” Hitler recalled personally seeing a prisoner transport returning from the front in 1918 loaded with American soldiers. “These big young men, blond and blue-eyed, what were they in fact?” he asked rhetorically. “They were all once the sons of German farmers. They are now our enemies.”

  He repeated the dirge three months later on June 26, 1927, when he hailed America as a paragon of racial purity and described it as a singularly Nordic achievement very much in the historical paradigm outlined by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race. “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,” Grant wrote. “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.” Retracing Grant’s footsteps back three hundred years to the founding days of America when New York was little more than a “fishing village,” Hitler recounted the Nordic conquest of the native population, first with “firearms” then with “firewater” and its expansion across the continent. “They eventually covered the entire region with a network of streets and rails,” Hitler observed. “There followed the founding of gigantic cities until finally the white race dominated the entire immense continent.” Enthralled with this vision of Nordic achievement, Hitler declared the United States of America, the Eckpfeiler der weissen Rasse, the cornerstone of the white race.

  In the summer of 1928, as Hitler dictated his sequel to the first two volumes of Mein Kampf, he returned to Grant’s theories on demography and history, in particular, on their respective implications for Germany and America. Hitler warned of the further “denordification”—Entnordung—of Germany, lamenting the emigration of Nordic talent to the United States, which, as he again noted, had emerged as a bastion of racial purity with all the attendant virtues and strengths. “This slow denordification of our people has led to a decline in our general racial quality and with it to a weakening of our technical, cultural, and even politically productive strength,” he wrote. Hitler viewed this siphoning of talent as one of those millennial demographic transformations that contributed to reshaping the contours of world history and a realignment of power.

  “The consequences of this weakening would be especially significant for the future because in world history a state is now emerging as an active player that, as a veritable European colony along the path of emigration,” Hitler wrote, “has for centuries received Europe’s best Nordic talent, permitting through the commonality of their original blood the development of a new community of people of the highest racial quality.” Hitler credited this development with the fact that the “American Union is not coincidentally the state in which presently by far the most, and in part incredibly intelligent inventions are made.” Hitler warned that Europe, which had depleted its “best blood” through endless wars and migration, was now being confronted by Amerikanertum—the notion of America as an all-embracing concept—embodied by a “young, racially selected people.” Hitler credited this development to American immigration and eugenic policies, which, “incited by the teachings of a few racial researchers,” would eventually result in America’s domination not only over Germany but all of Europe.

  Like Grant, Hitler also observed that the Great War had represented a mutual slaughter of Nordic stock, lamenting that many of the American soldiers, which a generation earlier had been born of German mothers, had returned to the continent to slaughter their fellow Nordics. Hitler predicted disaster from the corrosive effects of warfare and emigration. “If this circumstance continues for a few hundred more years, at least our German people will be so weakened in its overall significance that they will no longer have any claim to be identified as a people of consequence—Weltvolk—or at least will no longer be in the position to keep pace with the achievements of the significantly younger and healthier American people,” Hitler warned before recalling Grant’s cautionary tales about the passing of so many other great races in history. “As a result of a great number of causes, we will ourselves experience what no small number of cultures have proven in their historical development,” Hitler noted, “As a result of their burdens and as a consequence of their thoughtlessness the bearers of the Nordic blood as the most valuable racial element of the bearers of culture and the founder of states has slowly departed and left behind a human tangle of such minimal inner significance that the capacity to act will be wrung from their hands to be handed over to other younger and healthier peoples.” Hitler recalled, like Madison Grant, the vanished empires of Persia and Byzantium, and saw the inevitable shift of the “fate of the world”—Weltschicksal—from “racially inferior Europe” to the vital new people of North America.

  Faced with such dire prospects, Hitler suggested that there could be salvation for Europe if it were to replicate the American model. “The American Union has certainly fused populations of diverse ancestry into a new people,” he admitted. “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.” Noting that the “most industrious” Europeans had been those who tended to emigrate, and that this industriousness had been most prevalent among the “Nordic combinations,” “the American Union in fact ended up drawing on the diverse Nordic racial elements.” In the course of two hundred years, Hitler observed, the Americans were able to collect these diverse Nordic elements and fashion them into a new Staatsvolk, or citizenry.

  Adolf Hitler’s copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, accessible under the Library of Congress catalogue number GN 575.G754 1925, shares shelf space in the storage area of the rare book and special collections division of the Thomas Jefferson Building with a handful of other publications on eugenics that include four separate editions of Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, the earliest published in 1923; a 1929 handbook on sterilization for “racial hygienic” purposes that includes seven illustrations and several charts; and a revised ed
ition of Foundation of Human Hereditary Science and Racial Hygiene, a two-volume, thousand-page opus by the pioneering trio of German eugenicists, Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz.1 Across the aisle on the shelves reserved for unprocessed materials is a 1934 issue of Good Health: Newspaper for General Healthcare with an article, on page 55, titled “Twenty Years of the Sterilization Law in California.” Hitler’s remnant books demonstrate that Madison Grant had no monopoly on Hitler’s interest in eugenics.

  During the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler tracked developments within the field of eugenics for political as well as ideological purposes, drawing in particular on the American experience for contextualizing the situation in Germany. As the 1934 article in Good Health, which summarizes a Human Betterment Foundation report enumerating the social benefits of sterilization, notes, the California experience was of special interest to Germans. “Since the implementation of the sterilization law in Germany is currently at the center of debate, the experiences of other countries are of interest,” Good Health notes, observing that “sterilization is not a punishment but rather a protective measure.”

  According to Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003), Hitler followed closely the developments in the American eugenics movement and was familiar with the work of its leading figures, including Leon Whitney, executive of the American Eugenics Society, and two prominent advocates of American sterilization programs, Charles Davenport, a Harvard-educated biologist, and Paul Popenoe of the Human Betterment Foundation. “Now that we know the laws of heredity it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world,” Hitler observed in the mid-1930s. “I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

  Hitler’s most direct contact with American eugenicists was in December 1939 when he met Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard was the author of an infamous racist tract, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which had been published in 1920 with an introduction by Madison Grant. The book was translated into German by J. F. Lehmann Verlag in 1925, the same year as The Passing of the Great Race. In The Rising Tide of Color, which even Grant conceded in his introduction could strike readers as “unduly alarming” and “far-fetched,” Stoddard foresees a tidal wave of color that will overwhelm “white supremacy.” In the autumn of 1939 when Stoddard was in Berlin working as a correspondent, he was accorded a private audience with Hitler who rarely spoke with foreign journalists. William L. Shirer was in Berlin at the time and complained that Stoddard had received special treatment thanks to his work in eugenics, which had become a standard part of the Nazi school curriculum. On Tuesday, December 19, 1939, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Hitler received Stoddard in his Reich Chancellery office. The two men had a pleasant conversation in German—Hitler complimented Stoddard on his facility with the German language—and Stoddard was impressed by Hitler’s firm handshake but was struck by his relative detachment as a human being. When Hitler spoke, he never made eye contact. As agreed in advance of the meeting, Stoddard kept his promise and afterward refused to disclose the content of the discussion.

  Stoddard was, however, more forthcoming on his encounters with the fellow eugenicists he met in Germany, including Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, who coauthored Germany’s pioneering classic on racial hygiene, as well as Hans F. K. Günther, who had since moved from Norway to Germany to assume a professorship in Berlin. “The relative emphasis which Hitler gave racialism and eugenics many years ago foreshadows the respective interest toward the two subjects in Germany today,” Stoddard reported in 1940 following his visit to Berlin, noting that foreign attention on Jews was much more pronounced outside Germany than it was within the country. “Inside Germany, the Jewish problem is regarded as a passing phenomenon, already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich,” Stoddard observed with clinical reserve. “It is the regeneration of the Germanic stock with which public opinion is most concerned and which it seeks to further in various ways.”

  Stoddard was surprised to find that the German scientists readily conceded, as Grant had emphasized and Hitler had echoed, that Germany was not “an overwhelmingly Nordic land” and that the German people represented a “mixture of several European stocks.” Stoddard was struck in particular by the admissions of Günther, who readily conceded to the deficiencies in the German blood. “The Nordic ideal becomes for us an ideal of unity,” Stoddard quoted the “race pope.” “That which is common to all the divisions of the German people is the Nordic strain. The question is not so much whether we men now living are more or less Nordic; the question put to us is whether we have the courage to make ready, for future generations a world cleansing itself racially and eugenically.” This was the Grant agenda that Hitler had articulated a decade earlier during his July 4 speech in Weimar.

  Back then, when he lamented the “tragic” confrontation of Americans of German ancestry battling their own blood kinfolk in the Great War, Hitler ultimately held the “political process” accountable and insisted that politics ultimately needed to transcend sectarian interests and serve a single overriding purpose: the advancement of the interests of racial identity. He spoke of Volkstum, the all-encompassing definition of a single people. “When we look closer, we find that all politics that distances itself from this premise vanishes in the lives of the people, it will not last,” Hitler said, noting the relative transitory nature of day-to-day politics within the context of the sweep of historical development. “When we look back over the centuries of German history we ultimately encounter only a few monumental events that are consequential for the entire development of our identity as a people,” he said, underscoring the supremacy of demography over politics or even war as the driving force behind world history. “It is not the hundreds of battles that were fought that have retained a lasting influence for our people,” Hitler said. He dismissed as irrelevant the “hundreds of peace agreements and the results of wars.” They had “vanished without a trace,” he said. What mattered were the demographic shifts effected by the movement of peoples. That, Hitler noted, was the force that “changed the face of the world.” This was the essential message that Madison Grant had sought to convey in his book and that left an indelible impression on Hitler. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Grant’s notions of the supremacy of demography in world history helped fuel Hitler’s racial fanaticism, as evidenced in his speeches and writings, but they also carried consequential implications not only for the position of the individual in society but also for decisions related to policies, the management of foreign relations, and ultimately the conduct of warfare, as was to become tragically evident after 1933.

  Just how central Grant’s ideas remained to the Nazi regime in general and to Hitler in particular was expressed in an anecdote related by Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society. In 1934, Whitney had received a letter from the German chancellery requesting a copy of Whitney’s most recent book, The Case for Sterilization. Whitney dispatched the book and subsequently received a personal letter from Hitler complimenting his work. Flattered by the attention, Whitney showed the letter to Madison Grant during a meeting in Grant’s office. According to Whitney, Grant smiled, reached into a folder on his desk and showed Whitney his own letter from Hitler in which the Nazi leader not only thanked him for writing The Passing of the Great Race but described the book as his “Bible.” Following the seizure of power in January 1933, Hitler was to transform Grant’s treatise from holy scripture to state policy.

  * * *

  1 Hitler had a second edition of Foundation of Human Hereditary Science and Racial Hygiene with him in 1924 while in Landsberg Prison. The copy in the Library of Congress is a third edition with volume I, Human Hereditary Scienc
e, published in 1927, and volume II, Human Selection and Racial Hygiene (Eugenics), published in 1931.

  BOOK FIVE

  The Lost Philosopher

  Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.

  Passage highlighted in Hitler’s copy of German Essays by PAUL LAGARDE

  IN HIS ESSAY on book collecting, Walter Benjamin suggests that most bibliophiles have read at best 10 percent of their collections and claims to base his estimate on good authority. “Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And have you read all these books, Monsieur France?’” Benjamin recalls that the grand old man of French prose and Nobel Prize laureate deftly replied, “Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”

  Book collecting is an art, Benjamin insists, that matures with time. “For years, for at least the first third of its existence, my library consisted of no more than two or three shelves which increased only by inches each year. This was its militant age when no book was allowed to enter it without the certification that I had read it.” As time passed, Benjamin came to appreciate books for other reasons: a particularly handsome binding, enchanting illustrations, a rare antiquarian volume offered at auction, a memory of a particular book on a particular day in a particular bookshop. “Suddenly the emphasis shifted,” he says. “Books acquired real value.” Possession became an end unto itself. Without this “inflation,” Benjamin observes, he would never have acquired enough books to dignify the term library.