Hitler's Private Library

by Timothy W. Ryback

  While desperation and terror were certainly the most immediate causes for Benjamin’s suicide, Hannah Arendt later surmised a deeper existential crisis: the loss of his books. Standing at that desolate border crossing on the littoral edge of the Continent, he was peering into a future both bleak and threatening, knowing that his remaining books—his refuge, his “dwelling,” his livelihood—had passed into the hands of the Paris Gestapo. In reflecting on his final desperate act, Arendt was pained but not surprised. “How was he to live without a library?” she asked. What Arendt did not know, and Benjamin could never have assumed, is that his library in fact survived him. Confiscated by the Gestapo, it was dispatched to Berlin, where it was in turn claimed by the Soviets and taken to Moscow, only to be returned to Germany, first to the Theodor Adorno Archive in Frankfurt and eventually to its own archive in Berlin, where its journey began six decades earlier.

  Hitler’s own library was rapidly disassembled in the chaos of his collapsing empire. By the time he shot himself, American soldiers were already picking apart his collections in Munich. In Hitler’s office at the Nazi Party headquarters in the Brown House, a young lieutenant found the copy of Henry Ford’s My Life and Work that Hanfstaengl had inscribed back in 1924; the lieutenant eventually took the two-volume set, which “showed evidence of thumbing,” back to New York and put it up for sale at Scribner’s Bookstore.

  At Hitler’s Prince Regent Square residence, war correspondent Lee Miller found Hitler’s books partially intact. “To the left of the public rooms was a library full of richly bound books and many presentation volumes of signatures from well-wishers,” she noted. “The library was uninteresting in that everything of personal value had been evacuated: empty shelves were bleak spoors of flight.” A photograph shows Miller seated at Hitler’s desk. A dozen or so random books litter the adjacent shelves—paperbacks, hardcovers, a large, scuffed picture book of Nuremberg, three early editions of Mein Kampf in their original dust jackets.

  Four days later, advance troops of the 3rd Infantry Division arrived on the Obersalzberg to find Hitler’s Berghof a smoldering ruin. In the second-floor study, the hand-tooled bookcases had been reduced to ash, leaving only charred concrete walls and a soot-blackened strongbox, in which the soldiers found several first editions of Mein Kampf. The rest of Hitler’s books were discovered in a converted bunker room. “At the far end were arranged lounge chairs and reading lamps,” an intelligence officer assigned to the 101st reported. “Most of the books were concerned with art, architecture, photography and histories of campaigns and wars. A hasty inspection of the scattered books showed that it [sic] was notably lacking in literature and almost entirely devoid of drama and poetry.” The classified report identifies only three works by name: Genesis of the World War, by the American revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, and the critiques by the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant.

  War correspondent Lee Miller in Hitler’s Prince Regent Square residence. Most personal books had been removed by Hitler’s staff. Note stacked copies of Mein Kampf in the foreground.

  The handsomely bound tomes with their distinctive bookplates became the totem of choice for the victorious soldiers. Newsreel footage records American soldiers picking through Hitler’s book collection. One sequence shows a soldier opening a large volume to reveal the Hitler ex libris as the camera zooms in for a close-up; in another, several men emerge from the bunker with stacks of books under their arms. In the weeks that followed, the Berghof collection was picked apart book by book. By May 25, when a delegation of U.S. senators arrived on the Obersalzberg, they had to content themselves with albums from Hitler’s record collection. Not a single book remained.

  In those same weeks, Hitler’s book collection in Berlin was also disassembled. At nine o’clock on the morning of May 2, thirty-six hours after Hitler’s suicide, a Soviet medical team entered the nearly abandoned Führerbunker. They reemerged an hour later waving black lace brassieres from Eva Braun’s wardrobe and carrying satchels filled with diverse souvenirs, including several first editions of Mein Kampf. Successive waves of plundering followed. When Albert Aronson arrived in Berlin as part of the American delegation sent to negotiate the joint occupation of the city, his Soviet hosts took him on a tour of Hitler’s private quarters and as a courtesy let him take an unclaimed pile of eighty books. In those same weeks, the entire Reich Chancellery library—an estimated ten thousand volumes—was secured by a Soviet “trophy brigade” and shipped to Moscow and never seen again.1 The only significant portions of Hitler library’s to survive intact were the three thousand books discovered in the Berchtesgaden salt mine, twelve hundred of which made it into the Library of Congress. The rest appear to have been “duped out” in the process of cataloguing the collection.

  Thousands more lie in the attics and bookshelves of homes of veterans across the United States. Occasionally, random volumes find their way to the public. Several years ago, a copy of Peter Maag’s Realm of God and the Contemporary World, published in 1915, with “A. Hitler” scrawled on the inside cover, was discovered in the fifty-cent bin of a local library sale in upstate New York. Following Aronson’s death, his nephew donated the eighty books from the Führerbunker to Brown University. In the early 1990s, Daniel Traister, head of the rare book collection at the University of Pennsylvania, was given a biography of Frederick the Great along with several Berghof trophies. An accompanying note read “Dan, you wouldn’t believe how much money people want to offer me for these things. So far, I haven’t met one whom I want to have them. Here: destroy them or keep them as you wish.”

  A few years ago, I received a similar note after writing an article on Hitler’s library for The Atlantic Monthly. A Minnesota book dealer had inherited a Hitler book her mother had purchased at auction in the 1970s. Initially fascinated by the acquisition, the mother suffered a double bite of conscience: she was uncomfortable with profiting from a Hitler artifact and was equally uneasy about the motivations of a potential purchaser. After the mother’s death, her daughter inherited both the book and the dilemma. Having read my article, and sensing that my interests were purely academic, she offered me the book at cost. A week later, Hitler’s copy of Body, Spirit and Living Reason, by Carneades, arrived in a cardboard box.

  The treatise was in remarkably good condition, a hefty tome bound in textured linen with leather triangles on each corner and a matching leather spine with title and author embossed in gold. The linen was partially frayed and the leather was scuffed in places, but otherwise the volume was flawless. Opposite the Hitler ex libris, a typewritten note had been tipped into the binding recording the volume’s provenance:

  This volume was taken from Adolph [sic] Hitler’s personal library located in the underground air-raid shelter in his home at Berchtesgaden. It was picked up by Major A. J. Choos as a souvenir for Mr. E. B. Horwath on May 5, 1945.

  For several years, Body, Spirit and Living Reason haunted the bookshelves of my Salzburg apartment until I, too, grew uncomfortable with its presence. Like the Pennsylvania veteran and the Minnesota book dealer, I had no interest in profiting from the volume and had serious concerns about its further disposition. I ultimately resolved the dilemma by donating the volume to the Archive of the Contemporary History of the Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden, a private repository established by a resident archivist to preserve the history of the town, including this dark chapter.

  The Hitler Library in the rare book and manuscript division at the Library of Congress, as photographed in the 1970s.

  After spending nearly a decade behind a glass case in Hitler’s second-floor Berghof study—a silent witness to his daytime meetings and late-night reading—the Carneades volume had found its way back to Berchtesgaden, where its journey had begun nearly seven decades earlier. Indeed, habent sua fata libelli.

  * * *

  1 In the early 1990s, a Moscow newspaper reported on the presence of these books in an abandoned church in the
Moscow suburb of Uzkoe. Shortly after the article appeared, the collection was removed and has not been seen since.

  NOTES

  The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  PREFACE: The Man Who Burned Books

  xi HE RANKED DON QUIXOTE: Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, stenographed by Heinrich Heim, ed. Werner Jochmann (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1999), p. 281.

  xi “THE DEVELOPMENT OF”: Ralf George Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, band 3, 1935–1939 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1999), February 1, 1939, p. 1195.

  xi HE CONSIDERED SHAKESPEARE: Ibid.

  xiii HE APPEARS TO HAVE: For references to Shakespeare quotes, see index to Adolf Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 5 vols. in 12 parts (Munich: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1992– 1998).

  xiii “THE FIRST KARL MAY”: Hitler, Monologe, p. 281.

  xiv “DATES, PLACE NAMES”: Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), p. 65.

  xiv QUOTING HEGEL, BENJAMIN: Ibid., p. 68.

  xv “NOT THAT THEY”: Ibid., p. 69.

  xvii “THIS WATER PESTILENCE”: Paul Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1934), p. 276.

  xvii “THE COMBINATION OF Hitler’S”: Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. xiv.

  BOOK ONE: Frontline Reading, 1915

  4 “FALSE ALARM”: All citations related to conditions at the front in November 1915 are taken from the RIR 16 Regimental Daily Log at the Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv, Munich.

  5 “I WAS REPEATEDLY”: Anton Joachimsthaler, Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920 (Munich: Herbig Verlags, 1989), p. 143.

  5 DURING THE FIRST DAY: Photostat copy of letters written to Assessor Ernst Hepp in Munich, in folio in the Third Reich Collection, Library of Congress. For the exact quote, see the transcription of Hepp’s letters in Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980), p. 68.

  6 “THE BATTLE FOR”: Daily Log of the RIR 16, Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv, Munich, October 25, 1915.

  7 “TWO OF OUR COMPANY”: Fridolin Solleder, Vier Jahre Westfront: Geschichte des Regiments List, RIR 16 (Munich: Verlag Max Schick, 1932), p. 193.

  10 OSBORN ARRIVED ON: References to Osborn’s time at the front can be found in Max Osborn, Drei Strassen des Krieges (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1916).

  12 “THE BOSCHES ARE”: Ibid., p. 183.

  12 “BY THE WINTER”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 165.

  12 “I THINK SO OFTEN ABOUT”: Jäckel and Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 69.

  13 “EVEN IF I CAME IN”: Joachimsthaler, Korrektur, p. 127.

  14 “MESSENGER, REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS”: Adolf Meyer, Mit Adolf Hitler im Bayerischen Reserve-Infantrie-Regiment 16 List (Neustadt an der Aisch [Mittelfranken]: Georg Aupperle, 1934), p. 33.

  16 “ONE COULD NOT ATTEND”: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 20.

  16 THERE WAS WILHELM KUH: Descriptions of the various artists can be found in Solleder, Vier Jahre Westfront, pp. 187–99.

  18 “IN WYTSCHAETE ALONE”: Hitler’s letter to Hepp reprinted in Jäckel and Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 68.

  18 ONE RECENT OBSERVER: Joachimsthaler, Korrektur, p. 136.

  19 “ORGIES OF AN UNSPEAKABLE”: Max Osborn, Berlin (Leipzig: Seeman Verlag,

  1909), p. 3.

  20 “THE ULTIMATE”: Ibid., p. 198.

  20 “ITS COLUMNS HAVE”: Ibid., p. 198.

  20 “THE KING, ENTIRELY A CHILD”: Ibid., p. 171. 21 “the berliners were”: Ibid., p. 181.

  21 “I ALWAYS LIKED”: For Hitler’s quotations on his early impressions of Berlin, see Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, stenographed by Heinrich Heim, ed. Werner Jochmann (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag), pp. 100–102.

  22 “THIS TRIP IS”: Jäckel and Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 75.

  23 “THE MESSAGE RUNNERS”: Joachimsthaler, Korrektur, p. 165.

  23 “WHAT A CHANGE”: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 191.

  25 “RAUCH UNDERSTOOD”: Osborn, Berlin, p. 236.

  25 “THE CITY IS TREMENDOUS”: Werner Maser, Hitlers Briefe und Notizen: Sein Weltbild in handschriftlichen Dokumenten (Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1973), p. 106.

  25 “THE ENTIRE FLOOR”: Osborn, Berlin, p. 293.

  25 IN HIS SKETCH: For a description of the sketch, see Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2002), p. 188.

  26 “ON A HILL SOUTH”: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 202.

  BOOK TWO: The Mentor’s Trade

  28 FIRST TRENCH COAT: Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–1944, stenographed by Heinrich Heim, ed. Werner Jochmann (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1980), p. 208.

  29 “THIS MAN IS”: Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der “volkische” Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen: Schünemann Verlag, 1970), p. 67.

  30 “ECKART WAS THE MAN”: Otto Dietrich, Zwölf Jahre mit Hitler (Cologne: Atlas Verlag, 1955), p. 178.

  30 Hitler HAILED ECKART: Hitler, Monologe, p. 208.

  31 “MY IMPRESSION WAS”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 218.

  32 “AS A RESULT”: For quotations from Drexler, see Anton Drexler, Mein politisches Erwachen (Munich: Deutscher Volks-Verlag, 1919), p. 31.

  33 “ONCE I HAD”: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 220.

  33 “NOW WE HAVE AN AUSTRIAN”: Anton Joachimsthaler, Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920 (Munich: Herbig Verlag, 1989), p. 252.

  34 “WILL YOU FINALLY”: Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), p. 342.

  34 “A POWERFUL FOREHEAD”: Ibid., p. 342.

  35 “WE NEED SOMEONE”: Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler. Ein Biographie. Vol. I (Zurich: Europa-Verlag, 1936), p. 76.

  36 “I HAD BEEN ADMIRING”: Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler, p. 63.

  36 WHEN THE TWO MEN: Hitler’s visit to Berlin with Dietrich Eckart, as well as the use of an aircraft and the reference to Kapp’s press spokesman as a “Jew,” can be found in Jäckel and Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 117.

  36 “LET’S GO, ADOLF”: Dietrich, Zwölf Jahre mit Hitler, p. 179.

  37 “I FELT MYSELF DRAWN”: Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler, p. 66.

  38 “BUT WHAT DID Hitler”: Karl Dietrich Bracher, Adolf Hitler: Archiv der Weltgeschichte (Munich: Scherz Verlag, 1964), p. 38.

  38 “HORRIFIED”: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 52.

  38 “NOT UNTIL MY”: Ibid., p. 51.

  38 “AS ALWAYS IN SUCH”: Ibid., p. 56.

  39 “DIETRICH ECKART HIMSELF”: Jäckel and Kuhn, eds., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 341.

  39 “BURNING THEIR SYNAGOGUES”: Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Ein Zweigespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1924), p. 46. All further quotations from the conversation can be found on pp. 46–47.

  41 “I EXPERIENCED”: Dietrich Eckart in a letter to Ibsen’s son, dated June 11, 1912. Copy in Archiv zur Zeitgeschichte der Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden.

  41 “LET ANYONE WHO”: Ibid.

  42 ECKART HAD “PEER GYNT” embossed: Wilhelm Grün, Dietrich Eckart, als Publizist (Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1941), p. 50.

  42 IN HIS YOUTH: Hitler, Monologe, p. 281.

  42 “AS A BOY”: Letter from Paula Hitler to Sven Hedin, December 14, 1951. Copy in Archiv zur Zeitgeschichte der Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden.

  42 Hitler RECALLED
THAT: Hitler, Monologe, p. 284.

  43 FOUR SEPARATE RECORDINGS: The recordings are listed in a seven-hundred-page, three-volume catalogue registered in the Library of Congress as ML158.S3 1936, which contains Hitler’s complete Berghof record collection. Volumes I and II list the recordings by category—instrumental music, opera, operetta, light music, dance music, songs—with the composers arranged alphabetically. Volume III lists the recordings by title.

  44 “WHEN THE CURTAINS”: Reviews in Eckart’s Peer Gynt adaptation.

  46 “TO BE FORWARDED”: Werner Maser, Sturm auf die Republik (Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1994), p. 265.

  47 “THE JEWISH QUESTION”: Otto Dickel, Auferstehung des Abendlandes (Augsburg: Gebrüder Reichl Verlag, 1921), p. 81.

  48 “WHEN, AFTER THREE TEDIOUS”: Albrecht Tyrell, Vom “Trommler” zum “Führer” (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1975), p. 261.