With Hitler, we see a similar acceleration. During the decade Hitler resided at his modest Thiersch Street apartment, his library grew incrementally, filling first one bookcase, then another, and when both of these had reached capacity, accumulating in random and precariously pitched stacks on top of the bookcases, as evidenced in the photograph taken in early 1925. That year, his book collection was among the few notable possessions he recorded on his tax declaration. Among a meager inventory that included his writing desk and a chair, he listed “two bookcases with books.”
During the 1930s, Hitler’s collection expanded dramatically. Once again, the tax record testifies to the intensity of Hitler’s bibliophilic interests. Hitler’s single largest tax deduction after personnel costs and political travel was for books: 1,692 marks in 1930, with similar amounts in the two subsequent years. When insuring the contents of his Munich residence in November 1934 with the Gladbacher Fire Insurance Company, Hitler calculated the value of his possessions at 300,000 marks, with half the amount allocated to his art collection and the rest to books and other valuables. In a typed addendum to the standard policy, Hitler has added the provision “einschliesslich Bücher,” “including books.”
Word of Hitler’s book collection was such that when Janet Flanner wrote a profile of the Nazi leader for The New Yorker in 1935, she reported that he possessed a “fine library,” which she estimated at six thousand volumes. A few years later, Frederick Oechsner, the Berlin correspondent for United Press International, calculated the Hitler collection at 16,300 volumes. In more recent times, two scholars, Philipp Gassert and Daniel Mattern, studied the remnant Hitler books as well as archival materials, including the acquisition lists for the Reich Chancellery Library, and arrived at the Oechsner approximation.
After January 1933, the steady stream of books entering Hitler’s library became a deluge. Among Hitler’s books I found numerous memoirs by fellow veterans, who, like Adolf Meyer, had sent Hitler personal accounts of their service, dozens of volumes by local Nazi officials, and hundreds more by distant admirers who hail Hitler as a “messiah” and “savior.” There were also reports on diverse official activities. The head of a local association for graves of the war dead sent Hitler an album of photographs with the inscription “To the former frontline soldier, the forger of German unity and pathbreaker to new ascendancy from deep ignominy.” The president of the Reich Health Office gave Hitler a report on a 1938 medical convention with the handwritten inscription “Through the health of our people we physicians are battling for high performance in culture and economy and thus for the political strength of the nation.” A local Nazi Party member from Leipzig sent Hitler a copy of his publication Recommendation for the Improvement and Consolidation of Accounting Procedures for Cigar Factories, also a Path to National Socialist Economic Methods. In an intensification of the Benjamin 10 percent rule, one can assume that Hitler never saw, let alone read, a large portion of these books.
Hitler’s policy with the Gladbacher Fire Insurance Company, November 1934, contained a supplemental provision for his book collection.
Note “einschliesslich Bücher” (including books).
The books from Hitler’s minions are a different matter. Here we find volumes and inscriptions that preserve the nature of the personal dynamics between Hitler and some of his closest associates. On the fourth anniversary of the Munich putsch in 1927, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s self-absorbed deputy, gave Hitler a copy of a brief personal biography, Göring, What Were You Thinking! A Sketch from a Life, which he inscribed in “loyalty and reverence.” The SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave Hitler two ideology-infused volumes, Voices of Our Ancestors in 1934 and Death and Immortality in the World View of Indo-Germanic Thinkers in 1938. In this latter book, a Christmas present, Himmler uses the pagan circumlocution Julfest—related to Yuletide—to skirt Christian associations with the holiday season.
For Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday, Baldur and Henriette von Schirach presented Hitler with a two-volume antiquarian history of Braunau, the Austrian town where Hitler was born. The inscription reads “To our beloved Führer in celebration. Family Schirach, April 1933.” The personal nature of the Braunau history and the confident intimacy of its dedication preserve the special relationship between Hitler and the Schirachs. It also suggests the fragility of such relationships. The Nazi Youth leader entered Hitler’s inner circle of associates when he married Henriette Hoffmann, the daughter of Hitler’s personal photographer. Hitler, who had known Henriette since she was nine and used to refer to her as “my sunshine,” hosted their wedding reception in his Prince Regent Square apartment.
During the war Henriette used a late-night gathering at the Berghof to express her distress after witnessing the brutal treatment of Jewish women in Amsterdam. “I cannot believe you know about them,” she told Hitler. “Helpless women were being rounded up and driven together to be sent off to a concentration camp and I think that they will never return.” Hitler’s face froze. Silently, he rose to his feet. Then he screamed, “You are sentimental, Frau von Schirach! You have to learn to hate. What have Jewish women in Holland got to do with you?” Henriette fled the room and was advised to leave the Berghof immediately. She never saw Hitler again.
Among the most revealing volumes I found from Hitler’s close associates are those with inscriptions from the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the 1934 tribute to the Nazi Party, Triumph of the Will, and the two-part epic, Olympia, the landmark documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Riefenstahl gave Hitler two large-format coffee table books with black-and-white stills from Olympia, one for Christmas 1936 and the other for Christmas 1937. The latter volume is particularly handsome.
Bound in red linen, Beauty in the Olympic Games highlights the most dramatic moments of the Summer Games—Hans Woellke with eyes pressed shut as he prepares to hurl the shot that was to win him an Olympic gold medal; Gisela Mauermeyer throwing back her head in ecstasy and victory as her discus soars; the strikingly handsome gold medal winner Glenn Morris—whom Riefenstahl took briefly as a lover—gripping his javelin in the decathlon; Jesse Owens poised for a sprint, his fingertips planted firmly on the ground, his eyes fixed intently ahead. The caption to this last image reads “The fastest man in the world.”
There are also two close-ups of Hitler—one with his arm raised in a Nazi salute, and another with him in a pensive gaze—and more than a dozen of the famously narcissistic Riefenstahl “at work,” studying the Olympic stadium, consulting with her film team, directing a cameraman, sitting in the cutting room amid miles of unedited celluloid. The volume is dedicated to “my Führer in gratitude and loyalty,” as is the other Olympic book, Olympia, which features sixty-seven stills from the uncut footage and expresses both “inextinguishable loyalty” and “profound gratitude.”
Riefenstahl’s gratitude was especially well deserved. Hitler had not only given the thirty-four-year-old filmmaker exclusive domain and seemingly unlimited resources to film the Olympic Games in the summer of 1936 but had also personally rescued her from financial ruin that autumn. Despite an unprecedented budget of 1.5 million marks, Riefenstahl was nearly bankrupt by November. When a bank refused to advance her an additional 500,000 marks, Riefenstahl turned to the Nazi minister of propaganda. “Fräulein Riefenstahl came to me in hysterics. It is impossible to work with these wild women,” Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary. “Now she wants another half million for her film and [wants to] make two [films] out of it. Despite the fact that her bookkeeping stinks to high heaven. I remain cold-hearted. She cries. That is the ultimate weapon of a woman. But it doesn’t work with me any more.” But it did with Hitler. When Riefenstahl sidestepped Goebbels and appealed her case to Hitler, the loan was approved. The two Olympic books stand as testament to her appreciation as well as her cunning.
A third volume of cinematic stills, inscribed to Hitler with “loyalty and reverence” on the occasion of his birthday in April 1944, preserves Riefenstahl’s gratitu
de for an equally extravagant but more sinister project, Riefenstahl’s unfinished film Tiefland, which this time involved the use of slave laborers rather than Olympic athletes.
Leni Riefenstahl’s inscription to Hitler in volume one of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Collected Works.
Certainly, Riefenstahl’s most valuable contribution to Hitler’s library was a first edition of the collected works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Published in 1848, this handsome eight-volume set is bound in cream-colored vellum with gold leaf tipping on the pages. Each spine bears a hand-daubed quadrant in red pastel with the title in gold and a second quadrant, an inch below, in pastel green. The individual volumes are signified by Roman numerals. On the inside cover of volume one, in an elegant cursive script, Riefenstahl expresses her “deepest reverence” to “my dear Führer.” The inscription is dated June 20, 1933.
I was puzzled not only by Riefenstahl’s choice of an early-eighteenth-century philosopher but also by the date of the inscription, which did not correspond to any immediately evident occasion such as a birthday or holiday. When I came across these Fichte volumes in the spring of 2001, Riefenstahl was one year short of her hundredth birthday. I had communicated with her a few years earlier, while conducting research on the Daimler-Benz corporation—Hitler had once given Riefenstahl a Mercedes-Benz sports car—and now I again wrote to her, asking if she had any recollection of the Fichte books. She remembered the exact circumstances, which she had recorded in precise detail in her memoirs: a beautiful afternoon in the spring of 1933 on the terrace of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Riefenstahl had met Hitler the previous year when she was riding high on the success of her film The Blue Light, in which she played a village beauty—her eyes charged with erotic mysticism—who possessed visionary abilities. When Riefenstahl accompanied a friend to hear Hitler speak, she was so mesmerized that she wrote him an admiring letter. Hitler was equally enchanted. Having recently seen the dark-eyed beauty in The Blue Light, he invited her for a meeting at the North Sea fishing village of Horumersiel. The two spent several hours walking together along the windswept beach, with Hitler’s entourage following at a distance.
In the ensuing months Hitler and Riefenstahl saw each other repeatedly, spawning rumors that they were lovers. Hitler had more pressing issues. His political fortunes fluctuated dramatically. He was soundly defeated in his bid for the presidency in March, and he watched his party surge in parliamentary elections in July only to erode again in November. That autumn the Nazis faced a stark choice: seize the moment and negotiate their way into power with compromises, or remain in opposition and risk political and financial ruin.
When Hitler refused to compromise, Gregor Strasser resigned from the party amid rumors that he had been offered the position of vice chancellor. For Hitler, the betrayal was especially bitter. Along with his brother Otto, Gregor had masterminded the victories of the Nazi movement in northern Germany. Even after Otto left, Gregor remained loyal to Hitler, and in the grim days following the 1927 electoral setback, he inscribed a book to him “in loyal allegiance.” It is a handsomely bound edition of Alfred Rosenberg’s 374-page tribute to the leading figures of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Thirty November Portraits, inscribed to Hitler on November 18, 1927. Now, five years after committing his loyalty to paper, Strasser was cutting a deal for himself.
“These traitors, these cowards—and just before the final victory—these fools,” Riefenstahl remembers Hitler saying in a rage the day Strasser submitted his letter of resignation. “For thirteen years we have fought, toiled, and given everything—have overcome the worst crises, and now just before the goal this betrayal!” Riefenstahl listened sympathetically, offered consoling words, then left for three months in Switzerland, where she was starring as a daredevil pilot in the upcoming film SOS Iceberg, about a wife who ventures into the Arctic in search of her missing spouse.
Within two months, following a series of backroom deals, Hitler was chancellor. In late May 1933, shortly after Riefenstahl’s return to Berlin, she received a call on Hitler’s behalf inviting her for tea the following afternoon. On a pleasant spring day beneath a flawless blue sky, the fetching actress, dressed in a stylish white outfit with just enough makeup to “look natural,” arrived at the Reich Chancellery in her red coupe. She was escorted to the chancellery garden, where she found Hitler on the sun-filled terrace beside a table set for two.
As they sipped their tea, they talked about the dramatic reversal in Hitler’s fortunes, and Riefenstahl recalled that she, much like Henriette von Schirach was to do a decade later, expressed her concern about the treatment of Jews. When Riefenstahl mentioned a number of Jewish friends who had encountered difficulties under the new regime, Hitler held up his hand in protest. “Fräulein Riefenstahl, I know your opinion, which you shared with me in Horumersiel,” he said. “I respect you. But I would ask you not to speak with me about a subject that is uncomfortable for me. I respect you greatly as an artist, you have a rare talent, and I would not want to influence you. But I cannot have a discussion with you about the Jewish problem.” Despite Hitler’s mild reprimand, Riefenstahl said she felt herself go weak.
Hitler quickly turned the conversation to the topic of film. Riefenstahl claims that Hitler offered to make her head of artistic direction for the German film industry. Riefenstahl, flattered, nevertheless declined. She was an “artist,” not a “manager.” In truth, she despised Goebbels, the propaganda minister, and preferred to remain as far from his realm as possible. Hitler then suggested she direct a film about Horst Wessel, the storm trooper whose death in a barroom brawl had been immortalized in the Nazi anthem, “Raise the Banner!” (“Die Fahne hoch!”). “I can’t. I can’t,” Riefenstahl remembers sputtering in despair.
A morose silence followed. Hitler rose to his feet. “I am sorry that I cannot win you over for my films, but I wish you much luck and success,” he said curtly. He signaled to the waiter. “Please accompany Fräulein Riefenstahl to her car.”
Riefenstahl departed the Reich Chancellery in a state of extreme distress. When she recounted the fiasco to Arnold Fanck, a close friend who had directed her in White Ecstasy, and who had edited The Blue Light, he made a suggestion: send Hitler the “valuable first edition of the complete works of Fichte” that his sister had “elegantly” bound in white leather, and that Fanck had given Riefenstahl a few years earlier when he was first infatuated by her. “How about if you parted with them, wrote a few lines and gave them to Hitler as a present?” Fanck said.1 The Fanck proposition was doubly wise: It fed Hitler’s bibliophilic ambitions and flattered his philosophical pretensions.
For all the talk of Hitler’s exploitation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of the “master race” and “will to power” that Hitler used to headline the 1934 party rally and Riefenstahl cribbed as a title for her cinematic chronicle of that event, we have little credible evidence of Hitler’s personal engagement with serious philosophy. Most of what we know is tenuous and at best anecdotal.
Hitler’s confidant Hans Frank claimed that Hitler told him he carried Schopenhauer’s central work, The World as Will and Representation, with him during the First World War, though it is difficult to imagine the young corporal who left mud stains and candle wax on the pages of Osborn’s Berlin transporting, let alone reading, Schopenhauer’s magnum opus through the trenches of northern France. The claim becomes even less credible when one observes that Hitler, as previously noted, did not even know how to spell the philosopher’s name. In scribbled notes for a 1921 speech, Hitler writes “Schoppenhauer.”
However, Schopenhauer is listed among the authors of books Hitler borrowed from Krohn’s library at the National Socialist Institute between 1919 and 1921, and he makes a brief appearance in Mein Kampf, when Hitler references Schopenhauer’s infamous anti-Semitic description of the Jew as the “great master” of lies. Schopenhauer also finds his way into Hitler’s speeches, but generally finds himself in random company.
On one occasion, Hitler speaks of “Kant, Goethe, and Schopenhauer”; on another “Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer”; on another, Schopenhauer is bundled into a clutch of other nineteenth-century German nationalists that includes Richard Wagner, Paul Lagarde, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the Prussian pioneer of modern gymnastics. These references are made with no intellectual bearing or depth: they are mere catchphrases, and as easily could have been snatched from a passing conversation or casual reading.
Though there is no reason to doubt that Hitler owned copies of Schopenhauer’s works, I found only a single Schopenhauer volume among Hitler’s remnant books, a 1931 reprint of Schopenhauer’s translation of Hand Oracle and the Art of Worldly Wisdom, by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Balthasar Gracián. This inexpensive, ninety-two-page hardcover is so modest in size that Hitler’s bookplate fills the entire inside cover. The most solid piece of evidence to the centrality of Schopenhauer in Hitler’s life is the bust of the wild-haired philosopher that Hitler displayed on a table in his Berghof study.
Hitler’s associations with Nietzsche are equally eclectic and suspect. We know that he visited the Nietzsche archive in Weimar, where he was received by Nietzsche’s sister—a vicious anti-Semite—posed for a photo beside Nietzsche’s bust, and came away with the dead philosopher’s walking stick. The inventory of the Reich Chancellery library indicates that Hitler owned a first edition of Nietzsche’s collected works, an eight-volume set published between 1903 and 1909, but the only extant Nietzsche volume is a book taken from the Führerbunker in Berlin, Nietzsche’s Political Legacy, edited by Eitelfritz Scheiner. It is a slender hardbound book with a quote from Nietzsche scrawled on the inside cover by the editor and dated December 15, 1933: “It was those who created the races and hung them with a belief and with love: thus they were of service to life.”
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