Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  Hitler viewing the bust of Friedrich Nietzsche in Weimar in the early 1930s.

  Other sources attesting to Hitler’s interest in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are notoriously unreliable. Ernst Hanfstaengl claimed that Schopenhauer had been Hitler’s “philosophical god in the old Dietrich Eckart days”—Eckart himself attributes several Schopenhauer remarks to Hitler in his “Conversation”—but that following the meeting with Nietzsche’s sister, Hitler became a convert. “From that day at Potsdam the Nietzschean catchphrases began to appear more frequently—the will to power of the Herrenvolk, slave morality, the fight for the heroic life, against reactionary education, Christian philosophy and ethics based on compassion,” Hanfstaengl confidently recalled though he mistakenly placed the encounter in Potsdam rather than Weimar. “Schopenhauer, with his almost Buddhist gentleness, was buried forever, and the Gauleiters started to take their inspiration from a savage parody of Nietzsche.”

  Riefenstahl provides an equally vivid but contradictory account. “I have a great deal to catch up on,” Riefenstahl recalls Hitler telling her in the book-lined comfort of his Prince Regent Square apartment. “In my youth I did not have the means or the possibility to provide myself with an adequate education. Every night I read one or two books, even when I go to bed very late.” He said that these readings were his primary source of knowledge, the grist from which he derived his public speeches. “When a person ‘gives’ he also has to ‘take,’ and I take what I need from books,” he said. When Riefenstahl asked Hitler what he liked to read, he allegedly replied, “Schopenhauer.”

  “Not Nietzsche?” Riefenstahl asked.

  “No, I can’t really do much with Nietzsche,” Riefenstahl recalls Hitler telling her. “He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn’t have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.”

  Though unmentioned, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was in fact the philosopher closest to Hitler and his National Socialist movement in tone, spirit, and dynamic. Unlike Schopenhauer, a brooding, bookish man, or the frail, bedridden Nietzsche, Fichte was brash and defiant. In 1808, with French troops garrisoned in Berlin, Fichte defiantly called for Germans to rise against foreign oppression in his landmark Speeches to the German Nation. On the eve of the decisive battle against Napoleon at Leipzig, Fichte appeared before his students, armed for battle. He was said to be a mesmerizing speaker who held his audiences “prisoner” with his words. “To action! To action! To action!” he once declared. “That is why we are here.”

  Like Fichte, Hitler called for the “overthrow of the political elite” through a populist uprising. Fichte spoke of a Volkskrieg, a people’s war. Like Fichte, Hitler wanted to see the sundered German nation united. When Hitler denounced the political dialogue of parliamentary democracy and called for direct dialogue with the German people, he assumed a distinctly Fichtean rhetorical stance and called for “speeches to the German nation.”

  Most consequentially, Fichte helped pioneer the notion of German exceptionalism. The Germans were, he claimed, unique among the peoples of Europe. Their language was rooted not in Latin but in a distinctly Teutonic tongue. Germans not only talked differently from other Europeans, but they also thought, believed, and acted differently. Fichte argued that pure German language, free from the corruption of French and other foreign influences, could give expression to pure German thought. The Nazi efforts to purge the German language of foreign elements were grounded in this Fichtean precept, which Hitler articulated when he mused on the concept of the word Führer. “The title Führer is certainly the most beautiful because it emerged from our own language,” he observed, and went on to note with satisfaction that only members of the German nation could speak of “my Führer.”

  Fichte was also decidedly anti-Semitic. He believed that the Jews would always remain a “state within a state” and thus a threat to a unified German nation. He proposed ridding Europe of their presence by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. His other solution: “To cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea.”

  Of all the philosophical stars in the constellation of Nazi ideology, few blazed as intensely during the Third Reich or faded as quickly afterward as this late-eighteenth-century advocate of belligerent German nationalism. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche may have lent themselves conveniently to Nazi-era sound bites, but it was Fichte who provided the philosophical foundations for the toxic blend of Teutonic singularity and vicious nationalism. No one less than Dietrich Eckart identified Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as the philosophical triumvirate of National Socialism. Arnold Fanck acknowledged this fact when he recommended Fichte’s works as Riefenstahl’s peace offering to Hitler.

  Today, the Fichte volumes represent the only serious works of philosophy among Hitler’s surviving books. Although there are more than a hundred pages of marginalia in the Fichte volumes, close scrutiny of several intrusions, especially the words “sehr gut” scrawled in the margin of page 594 of volume four, suggests an authorship other than Hitler’s. In addition, the potentially most revealing volume, which contains Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation as well as an essay on rhetorical technique, is missing.

  Despite the absence of these seminal works of German philosophy, the remnant Hitler library contains a cache of books that is almost certainly more central to the shaping of the dark core of Hitler’s worldview than the high-minded musings of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Nietzsche: more than fifty volumes inscribed to Hitler between 1919 and 1935 by Julius Friedrich Lehmann, an individual who has the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudoscience of biological racism.

  Collectively, the fifty-odd Lehmann books, all but one of them published by his eponymous press, J. F. Lehmann Verlag, preserve the National Socialist legacy in the full range of its multifaceted nuance and mendacity, a veritable compendium of the pervasive moral, ethical, social, political, legal, economic, and historical absurdities and excesses we have come to associate with the Nazi era. I found a 1930 treatise, The Lawyer’s Mission, inscribed to Hitler as a “contribution to reclaiming German law,” and a book on Weimar democracy titled Justice in Chains. A proposal on health insurance bore the subtitle “Once a Curse, Transformed into a Salvation for the People.”

  In his handwritten dedications to Hitler, Lehmann repeatedly refers to these books as “building blocks” for the Nazi movement and, in some cases, as educational primers for Hitler himself. In the first volume of a massive, two-part study, Teachings on Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, Lehmann wrote, “To Mr. Adolf Hitler, as an important building block for deepening his understanding. Warmly dedicated, J. F. Lehmann.” A 1929 manual on sterilization by Otto Kankeleit, Terminating Reproductive Capacity for Racial-Hygienic and Social Reasons, which includes seven harrowingly detailed illustrations, has been inscribed to Hitler “in great friendship.”

  Like Dietrich Eckart, Lehmann was an early supporter of right-wing causes and recognized Hitler’s nascent potential. The first book Lehmann gave Hitler was the 1919 edition of German History by Einhardt, that Ernst Hanfstaengl recalled seeing among Hitler’s early collection, which bears the inscription “Herr Hitler, as thanks for his work in enlightening the German people.” During the 1923 putsch, Lehmann’s Munich villa was used to detain the hostage Bavarian government. Mostly, though, Lehmann appears to have supplied Hitler with inscribed copies of his publications, book by book, year after year, for nearly a decade and a half, gradually filling the bookcases in Hitler’s Thiersch Street apartment and eventually gracing the shelves of the Prince Regent Square residence. I found the translation of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. Hitler’s copy, a fourth edition publish
ed in 1925, is “warmly inscribed” by Lehmann.

  Along with Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, the most notable books are those by Hans F. K. Günther, whose works Hitler included among his recommended readings for Nazi Party members. The former literary scholar turned social anthropologist produced a series of infamous studies on racial typology that veritably defined the Nazi discipline of racial anthropology and laid the groundwork for its racial laws and eugenics programs. Günther’s efforts earned him the sobriquet “Racial Günther” (Rassengünther), and the personal attendance of Adolf Hitler at his appointment ceremony as a professor at the University of Jena.

  Four of Hitler’s six Günther volumes are copies of Racial Typology of the German People, a dense five-hundred-page tome that provides a compendium of Aryan identity. The earliest volume, a third edition published in 1923, is inscribed by Lehmann to “the successful champion of German racial thinking,” and is followed by a 1928 edition sent as a “Christmas greeting,” a fourteenth edition in 1930, and a copy of the sixteenth edition in 1933 with a handwritten inscription that hails Hitler as “the trailblazer of racial thinking.”

  This latter volume, bound in simple gray linen with the author and title imprinted in old German script on the cover and an extended appendix of European Jews, shows signs of frequent or sustained study. It opens effortlessly to reveal worn pages and a ragged tear along the inside cover where the spine has begun to come apart.

  With this cache of Lehmann books we are in possession of a core collection within the Hitler library and the primary building blocks not only for Hitler’s intellectual world but for the ideological foundations of his Third Reich.

  In Lehmann’s publications, Hitler found in particular the alleged empirical substance he had missed in the racist pamphlets of his Vienna years. As a leading publisher of medical textbooks and handbooks known for the quality and precision of their illustrations, J. F. Lehmann Verlag brought serious scientific credentials to the pseudoscience of biological racism. Even as Lehmann supplied the medical community with indispensable handbooks and reference works, he was serving as the major purveyor of biological racism. J. F. Lehmann Verlag is said to have almost singlehandedly established the discipline of racial science in the Weimar Republic. For his contribution to advancing the Nazi cause, Hitler honored Lehmann with the gold party pin, one of the highest awards in Nazi Germany.

  A page from Hitler’s copy of Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, depicting Jews from various regions of Germany.

  As I rummaged through these solidly bound, richly illustrated volumes, many of them printed on high-quality paper that has retained its suppleness and vibrancy, I calculated that Hitler’s Lehmann collection easily doubled the Benjaminian 10 percent reading quotient. Several of the books were well worn, with pages bent and spines well-exercised so they opened leisurely, frequently to pages bearing illustrations. One volume, a 1934 reprint of Paul Lagarde’s late-nineteenth-century collection of nationalist and anti-Semitic writings, bore nearly a hundred pages of penciled marginalia: underlinings, vertical strikes, and occasional question marks.

  Lagarde’s German Essays belongs to a handful of “classic” works of German nationalism that found their way into Hitler’s collection: several works by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, including one titled Richard Wagner: The German as Artist, Thinker, Politician; a reprint of Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt as Educator, an awkward plagiarizing of a Nietzsche essay on Schopenhauer; and most notably The Third Reich by Arthur Moeller von den Bruck, whose title provided the Nazi movement with its emblematic slogan.2

  A copy of Arthur Moeller von den Bruck’s 1923 treatise The Third Reich, whose title provided the Nazi movement with its emblematic slogan. This copy was inscribed to Hitler in November 1924, on the first anniversary of the failed Munich putsch.

  Lehmann appears to have given Hitler two copies of Lagarde’s German Essays, each with a slightly different dedication. The first is inscribed “to the prophet of the Third Reich, to its creator,” and the second “from the old prophet of the German people, to his successor.” The Hungarian scholar Ambrus Miskolczy has studied Hitler’s marginalia and speculates that the second volume could possibly have been intended for Alfred Rosenberg and mistakenly incorporated into the Hitler collection after the war, but ultimately concludes that both volumes were intended for Hitler. Miskolczy observes that Lehmann would have possessed more “tact” than to “elevate” Rosenberg above Hitler as the prophet of the Third Reich. He also notes that the selection of particular passages as well as the “distinctive fine pencil lines” suggest Hitler’s authorship of the marginalia.

  In particular, Miskolczy notes the highlighting of a passage that corresponds to Hitler’s very specific views on the theory of revolution and the state. Miskolczy observes that on page 44 Lagarde writes, “All the power of Germany shall be expressed in state actions, and the state that ought only to be the nation’s servant, shall become the lord of the nation’s surrogates,” with Hitler’s pencil following in apparent concurrence. On the previous page, a question mark beside a passage about creating a single religion for Germany leads Miskolczy to the conclusion that “it would be more typical of Hitler” to challenge such a proposition since he remained ambivalent or at least noncommittal on spiritual matters, while Rosenberg advocated militantly for the fusion of state and religion. The highlighting of passages related to a strong-willed leader, Miskolczy further observes, also suggesting Hitler’s hand.

  On page 72 of Lagarde, for example, there is a line beside a passage discussing the sense of alienation experienced by “great men” who shape the destiny of their societies, a sentiment echoed in marked passages in Hitler books I found at Brown University.3 The nature of these intrusions seems to support the Miskolczy thesis, as does Hitler’s own theory of reading as detailed in Mein Kampf. He compares the process of reading to that of collecting “stones” to fill a “mosaic” of preconceived notions. He studies the table of contents or even the index of a book, then gleans select chapters for “usable” information. On occasion, he reads the conclusion first, to determine what to look for in advance. He recommends that a reader hone the skill of “instantly” discerning information that is useful to his personal needs or general knowledge.

  “Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly coordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created by his imagination, it will function either as a corrective or a complement, thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture,” Hitler wrote. “Then, if life suddenly sets some question before us for examination or answer, the memory, if this method of reading is observed, will immediately take the existing picture as a norm, and from it will derive all the individual items regarding these questions, assembled in the course of decades, submit them to the mind for examination and reconsideration, until the question is clarified or answered.”

  Through this technique Hitler was able to commit prodigious amounts of information to memory with virtually instant recall on a seemingly endless array of subjects, from tank production to works of drama. One evening after listening to Hitler compare the respective qualities of works by Friedrich Schiller and George Bernard Shaw, Goebbels returned home and scribbled in his diary, “The man is a genius.”

  As Hitler told Riefenstahl, he read nightly, a habit that appears to date back to his early years in Linz and Vienna, where August Kubizek observed his intense passion for books. “Books, always more books! I can never remember Adolf without books,” Kubizek recalled. “Books were his world.” Another early Hitler associate, Rudolf Häusler, who shared quarters with Hitler in Vienna and later in Munich, recalls his roommate reading dense tomes until two or three in the morning. According to Kubizek, this passion for books had nothing to do with leisure or pleasure. It was “deadly serious business.”

  From my own conversations with surviving Hitler associates, it appears that Hitler’s nocturnal reading habit wa
s still in place decades later. Margarete Mitlstrasser, one of Hitler’s longtime housekeepers, recounted a nightly regimen that included his reading glasses, a book, and a pot of tea. Hitler read intensely, even fiercely. The Berghof estate manager, Herbert Döhring, recalled an evening when Eva Braun intruded on one of these late-night reading sessions and was dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway. Döhring himself exercised extreme caution. Each night before closing the Berghof, he would walk outside to wait until Hitler’s reading light was extinguished. On more than one occasion, dawn was breaking on the horizon. Anni Plaim, a Berghof maid, remembered a sign outside Hitler’s second-floor study that read ABSOLUTE SILENCE.

  In the summer of 2001, when I spoke with Traudl Junge, Hitler’s last surviving secretary, she mused on the morning breakfasts when Hitler would reprise his previous night’s reading in extensive, often tedious detail, a habit that was insightfully observed by Christa Schröder, another of Hitler’s secretaries, when she explained in her memoirs that he would discuss “a topic that he had read about numerous times in order to anchor it more permanently in his mind.” Schröder noted the “compartmentalized” nature of Hitler’s mind, which permitted him to recall complete passages from books.

  The corresponding analogue to this compartmentalization process is preserved among Hitler’s books in a twenty-volume, leather-bound deluxe edition of the Great Brockhaus Encyclopedia, a massive compendium of facts and information designed to be retrieved with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, the ultimate resource for the self-educated man and, by all accounts, Hitler’s preferred source of reference and affirmation.