Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  The preface to an unpublished manuscript titled “Law of the World,” sent to Hitler by Max Riedel in August 1939.

  Unquestionably, the most interesting of the works I found among the esoteric volumes is an unpublished treatise called “Law of the World,” by Maximilian Riedel, which includes a two-page diagram outlining the linkages between the physical and spiritual worlds, describes the techniques by which one accesses the deeper wisdoms embedded in the natural world, and bears repeated penciled intrusions in passages related to the relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds.

  Today, this somewhat battered, 326-page typewritten manuscript, mimeographed and bound and subtitled “The Coming Religion,” is catalogued in the Library of Congress as BR856.R49. The preface is dated June 21, 1939, with the year 1937 written above it in blue pencil, possibly suggesting that the text was two years in the making. The word manuscript has been scrawled across the cover page in bold red letters, with an additional scribbled blue-pencil notation: “Appeal for the recognition of the existence of God.” It is clearly a work in progress. Accompanying the manuscript is a typewritten letter addressed to Hitler and dated August 7, 1939, claiming that this “new discovery” provides “incontrovertible scientific evidence” of “the concept of the trinity of God as a natural law.”

  When riedel entrusted his unpublished manuscript to Anni Winter, the housekeeper at Hitler’s Prince Regent Square apartment, in August 1939, Hitler was summering at his Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. He had spent the previous week in Bayreuth, where he attended performances of Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman, and the entire Ring of the Nibelungen, including the monumental climax, Twilight of the Gods, in which the Nibelungen empire crashes into ruin and the waters of the Rhine rise to cleanse the earth of greed and failed ambition.

  Hitler’s cultivated leisure activity belied the tensions of that politically overheated summer, as Europe tottered on the brink of war. On his return to the Berghof on August 4, Hitler found a terse message from the Polish government bluntly rejecting his proposals to resolve escalating antagonism between Poland and Germany. On August 7, the day Riedel posted his manuscript, Hitler summoned Alfred Forster to the Berghof to discuss the growing crisis.

  As Hitler’s “man in Danzig,” this former storm trooper had spent the last nine years building the party structure in that city and fomenting unrest among its three hundred thousand German residents. He exhibited the steely, rough-edged belligerence Hitler liked to see in his top lieutenants. When the League of Nations delegated Carl J. Burckhardt to the free city as its high commissioner, Forster welcomed the cultivated Swiss diplomat with disarmingly easy ungraciousness: “So, you are the representative from this Jewish-Freemason gossip club in Geneva!”

  Hitler spent much of the day with Forster, discussing the situation in Danzig and the appropriate German response to the Polish missive, then sent him back to Danzig only to recall him three days later, this time in the company of Burckhardt. On August 11, Forster and Burckhardt boarded a two-engine Douglas aircraft in Danzig and flew to Salzburg. There they were met by a car that transported them to Berchtesgaden, and from there to the Obersalzberg, past the Berghof, then up a series of dramatic, serpentine switchbacks hewn into shear rock that brought them to the Kehlsteinhaus, a massive stone house perched atop a knife’s-edge cliff. They were greeted by a stunning vista of snowcapped peaks cast against a flawless blue sky and Adolf Hitler, dressed in a formal blue suit.

  “I hope you had a comfortable flight,” Hitler said in welcoming Burckhardt with casual graciousness. “My Condor aircraft is not as fast as the Douglas, but it is more solid and useful as a military aircraft.” He then added ominously, “It holds up better under gunfire.”

  Hitler told Burckhardt that he knew it had been a stressful week. He talked about Forster’s efforts to ameliorate the situation, of German patience, of growing Polish intransigence. Forster was a patient man, Hitler said, and so was he, but they had their limits. Hitler expressed particular annoyance at the belligerent tone of the missive he had received from Warsaw upon his return from Bayreuth. “Last Friday I would have been satisfied with a telephone call from them,” he said. “The Poles knew that talks were possible. They did not have to send a note.”

  The two men spent the next several hours discussing both the politics and “technicalities” of the failed peace negotiations, with Hitler repeatedly billowing into a rage. He refused to be served ultimatums. He would not be ridiculed in the press. He would not be accused of having lost his nerve. “If the slightest incident occurs,” Hitler said threateningly, “I will smash the Poles so completely that not a single trace of Poland will be found afterwards. Like a lightning bolt I will strike with the full power of my mechanized army, the power of which the Poles have no idea. Mark my words.”

  Burckhardt sought to calm the Nazi leader, expressing sympathy for his concerns but also cautioning that an armed conflict with Poland would necessarily ignite a larger war. “If I must lead Germany into war then I would rather do it today than tomorrow,” Hitler said, again with rising temper. “I will not lead it the way Wilhelm II did. He let pangs of conscience keep him from throwing in his armed forces completely. I will fight to the very last.”

  “A new war will usher in the end of civilization,” Burckhardt warned. “That is a great responsibility to bear for the future.” He suggested it was better “to live in honor” than to burden oneself with the responsibility for war. “The stronger one is, the longer one can be patient,” he counseled. “The more honor a man has, the more attacks he can fend off. Someone once said to me that Germany’s strength lies in being patient when it comes to the Polish and Danzig questions.” Hitler brightened and told Forster to note the remark for his foreign minister. They continued to discuss details of the crisis. At one point, Hitler rose from his chair and suggested they go for a walk. Leaving the massive stone building, they walked onto the craggy ridge to gaze across the towering peaks that even in late summer were still blanketed in white. Hitler paused to take in the view. “How happy I am when I am here,” he said. “I have had enough trouble. I need my rest.”

  “You are expressing the sentiments of the entire world,” Burckhardt said, then underscored Hitler’s singular role in the world. “You more than anyone have the chance to give the world the peace and quiet it needs.”

  As they strolled, Hitler grew meditative. He spoke about the singular nature of the German people. They were a true nation-state—Volksstaat—unified by blood and soil, he said. That is what made the Germans different, say, from the British, who commanded an empire cobbled together from different races, a mongrel assemblage of peoples. Burckardt responded that all peoples were essentially the same, that human nature was universal, united by a common desire for peace. “Paix, Pax, Pacts,” he informed Hitler. “These words all have the same root.” He reminded Hitler that the German word for “peace,” Friede, derived from the same linguistic root as that for “happiness,” Freude.

  Hitler let the remark pass and returned to his wounded pride, to the insults he had endured, to his determination to protect German interests in Poland at any price. His mood darkened yet again. “I am not bluffing,” he told Burckhardt. “If even the slightest incident occurs in Danzig or anything happens to our minorities, I will strike hard.”

  By any measure, this isolated cliff in the Bavarian Alps, five thousand feet above sea level with a dramatic snowcapped panorama, was an unlikely place for a high commissioner of the League of Nations to meet a head of state to discuss alleviating tensions in a Baltic port city, not to mention averting “the end of civilization.” But it was the sort of theatricality that Hitler preferred to underscore his place in politics and the world, similar to the power conveyed by the Colosseum on the ancient Romans, or the fabled domes of the Kremlin on the rulers of Russia, whether tsarist or communist, or the mirrored galleries of Versailles, which the French used to impress their allies and awe potential opponents and, in
1919, to humiliate the Germans.

  In Berlin, Hitler had constructed representational spaces such as the New Reich Chancellery, and had plans for grander spaces yet, but he chose this mountain in the Bavarian Alps for conceiving and engineering many of his most momentous acts of governance. It was at the Berghof, halfway down the slope from the Kehlsteinhaus, that he had sparred with Cardinal Faulhaber on matters of the spirit, browbeat the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg into annexing Austria to Germany, charmed Neville Chamberlain into dismembering Czechoslovakia, and was now orchestrating the ethnic unrest that would serve as the prelude to the invasion of Poland. He would stand with a guest before the massive picture window, with its view of the Untersberg, as if to say, This is my realm, this my power. When weather permitted, the window could be retracted, permitting an unobstructed view of the imposing stone face. He claimed to have designed the entire Berghof with this view in mind.

  Hitler sought both refuge and inspiration in the natural world. Ever since that morning in the spring of 1923 when he had stood on the balcony of the guesthouse Pension Moritz and looked across the valley at the snowcapped mountain, the Untersberg had exercised a magnetic power over him. “A view of the Untersberg, indescribable!” Hitler recalled. “The Obersalzberg became something magnificent for me. I fell completely in love with that landscape.”

  When Helene Bechstein offered Hitler a piece of property on another, sunnier part of the Obersalzberg, he declined her generous offer. He preferred the view to the Untersberg. He would eventually code-name the invasion of the Soviet Union, the largest land assault in history, “Operation Barbarossa,” after the medieval German emperor whose spirit was said to reside within the Untersberg. The very geography of his second-floor study spoke to the centrality of this mountain in his life. Seated at his writing desk in the center of the book-lined room, with its overstuffed armchairs and brass lamps, Hitler looked through a pair of French doors, flanked by oil portraits of his parents, with a view of the Untersberg and the rolling hills of Austria beyond, a sight line that at a glance represented a personal fusion of “blood and soil,” his personal genealogy linked to his native soil. “Yes, I am closely attached to this mountain,” Hitler once observed. “There is much that happened there, that came and passed. They were the most wonderful times of my life.” He was particularly attached to the original house around which he constructed the Berghof. “All my great plans were conceived here,” he claimed.

  The Berghof guestbook, designed by Frieda Thiersch and inscribed by numerous visiting dignitaries. It was taken at the end of the war by a French officer.

  Surviving members of the Berghof staff—Anni Wilkins, Hitler’s housekeeper in the old Haus Wachenfels before its conversion into the Berghof; Herbert Döhring, the Berghof estate manager; Gretl Mitlstrasser, who ran the Berghof after Hitler’s sister departed—recounted numerous stories of Hitler’s private “communing” on the property: when the guests and entourage had departed; when he paced hour-long circles in the garden, his head bowed, his arms locked behind his back; when he held late-night vigils on the Berghof balcony, watching the Untersberg bathed in moonlight; when he let the ethereal strains of Wagner’s Lohengrin fill his study as he watched the jagged cliffs peek through the enfolding mists. They described symmetries of mood and spirit between Hitler and this mountain. With its patches of green meadows, its sheer cliffs, and a mantle of snow that draped its summit for most of the year, the Untersberg could be ominous and threatening at one turn, as on the afternoon of the Schuschnigg visit, and deceptively comforting and reassuring at another, as it was when Cardinal Faulhaber watched the cloud cover lift and was reminded of the storm that cleared over Lebanon and—Dominus benedicet populo suo in pace—the Lord had seemed to bless the world with peace.

  Hitler sitting at the window of his Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. He once said that his “great plans” were conceived here.

  In August 1939, the Untersberg played center stage in a natural drama that reflected the ominous political mood of those weeks when the night sky along the northern horizon was illuminated by a particularly intense display of the aurora borealis—as was widely reported in the press—that washed the cragged mountain in a turquoise hue that gradually transformed into a deep violet that became an “eerily beautiful” red glow. “At first we thought it was a large fire in one of the towns north of the Untersberg,” recalled Nicolaus von Below, who watched the display with Hitler on the Berghof terrace, “until the red light engulfed the entire northern sky and it became evident that this was an unusually intense display of the northern lights, a natural phenomenon that rarely occurred in southern Germany.” Awed by the eerie scene, Hitler’s adjutant suggested that it was perhaps a sign of an imminent and bloody war. “If it has to be, then as quickly as possible,” Hitler replied. The longer wars lasted, he said, the bloodier they became. By then, Maximilian Riedel’s “Law of the World” had been waiting for Hitler at his apartment in Munich for nearly three weeks.

  Riedel made a smart tactical move when he entrusted his manuscript to Anni Winter. By August 1939, most of the hundreds of books sent to Hitler were intercepted by either Albert Bormann, who ran Hitler’s office at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, or Bormann’s older brother Martin, who oversaw Hitler’s affairs on the Obersalzberg. Manipulative, self-serving, power-mongering, and riven by sibling rivalry, the Bormann brothers filtered all but the most important queries, requests, complaints, appointments, and gifts from Hitler’s life. Only books from close Hitler associates made their way into his hands. The chances of his seeing a typewritten manuscript by a distant admirer were negligible. Anni Winter therefore proved to be a convenient back door to Hitler. Few people had as intimate and proximate access.

  Winter had been resident in Hitler’s Munich apartment for nearly a decade. During the war, she locked the basement air raid shelters, and told the building’s residents that if she had fifty gallons of petrol she would not hesitate to set the building on fire with them in it. Her neighbors, unsurprisingly, found her “vulgar” and “disagreeable”; Hitler liked her spunk as well as her discretion. When his niece, Geli, committed suicide in the apartment in September 1931, Winter called Hitler before giving a brief and terse deposition to the police, and never discussed the matter again. Bonded with Hitler by tragedy, Winter became family. Hitler left her a lifelong stipend in his handwritten will from May 1938, a commitment he repeated seven years later in his “bunker testament.” Beside Eva Braun, Anni Winter was the only other beneficiary mentioned by name.1

  It is unclear when Winter passed Riedel’s “Law of the World” to Hitler, but his schedule in the overheated days of August 1939 had him traveling directly to Berlin and from there to Poland, where he remained for most of September and much of October. He returned to Munich on November 8, when he attended the annual commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch, and again on November 11, when he was briefly back in town. He most likely saw the Riedel manuscript during a two-day stay later that month, from November 25 to 26, when he spent an overnight at his Prince Regent Square apartment.

  Riedel’s cover letter would have spoken to him:

  My Führer!

  Based on a new discovery I have been able to prove with incontrovertible scientific evidence the concept of the trinity of God as a natural law. One of the results of this discovery is, among other things, the seamless relationship between the terms: Truth-Law-Duty-Honor. In essence, the origins of all science, philosophy and religion. The significance of this discovery has led me to ask Frau Winter to hand to you personally the enclosed manuscript.

  Heil my Führer!

  Like Carneades’s Body, Spirit and Living Reason, with its chapters on the “Quantitative and Geometric Definition of Material,” “Chemical, Biological and Psychological Knowledge and Science,” and the “Aristotelian, Immaterial Dualistic Definition of the Spirit,” Riedel seemed to be promising Hitler insights into the spiritual world based on the sort of “scientific evidence” Hans
Günther had provided for understanding the superiority of the Aryan race. It was just the sort of thing Hitler liked. Through extensive scientific research, Riedel had determined that beyond the five known senses, the human being possessed additional perceptive capacities that had gone unrecognized and that existed in a vestigial state. By identifying and cultivating these untapped cognitive abilities, a person was able to access reserves of knowledge and insight, to connect to the deeper forces that moved the world, those universal “reservoirs” of knowledge described by Carl Ludwig Schleich and Ernst Schertel. To support his thesis, Riedel provided definitions and descriptions, detailed lists that charted various relationships between the physical and spiritual worlds, and a two-page foldout diagram that charted his theory with a series of intersecting spheres linked by a spiderweb of connecting lines—soul, space, reality, present, past, possibility, transformation, culture, afterlife, humanity, infinity—and included a series of Aristotelian progressions: solid-liquid-gas; hate-love-devotion; fact-knowledge-wisdom.