Secrets of Hitler's forgotten library

Published on Saturday 3 May 2003 01:00

AS HE opened the book, a trickle of sandy dust fell out. The paper was stained with candle wax and there was a short black hair nestling between the pages.

Dr Timothy Ryback, a researcher and journalist, realised no-one had touched the book since its last owner, a Private Adolf Hitler, read it in the trenches during the First World War.

"I realised this book had never been touched since Adolf Hitler was reading it in his dug-out in 1917,"said Mr Ryback. "After he had finished reading by candlelight, he had closed it and no-one had opened it again."

For Dr Ryback, an American historian and political analyst, it was a revelatory moment, one that convinced him that there are many secrets still to be uncovered in what is left of Hitler’s library.

In historical terms, the German dictator and architect of the Holocaust may be remembered as a burner of books, but in life, Hitler loved the printed word and boasted a collection somewhere in excess of 16,000 volumes.

A friend from his teenage years, August Kubzieck, wrote: "I just can’t imagine Adolf without books. Books were his world." But generations of historians and biographers have ignored the remaining volumes of Hitler’s library, saying they represent only a fraction of the books he once owned and arguing that many were never touched by the Nazi leader.

Dr Ryback, a Harvard-trained historian who heads the academic think-tank called the Salzburg Seminar, has made it his business to pore over the remnants of the collection which have found their way to the Library of Congress in Washington. He has written an account of his research and findings for the magazine Atlantic Monthly.

The 1,200 volumes known as the Third Reich Collection were found hidden in Schnapps crates buried in a Munich salt-mine by United States soldiers from the 101 Airborne Division in the spring of 1945. They were delivered to the Library of Congress in 1952.

The collection was not fully catalogued until 2001, when the "Hitler Library" listed the volumes, indicating which contained the Fuhrer’s bookplate - an eagle and a swastika, along with the words Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.

But scholars such as Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler won international acclaim, have continued to ignore the forgotten remnants of the book collection.

Dr Ryback claims Kershaw now says this was a mistake. "In retrospect, Kershaw concedes he should have at least mentioned the collection in a footnote," he says.

Far from being just a footnote to history, believes Dr Rybeck, as many as 200 of the books stored in the US library were personally owned by the German fhrer, and many have notes and annotations which offer fascinating insights into the mind of Hitler.

In his perusal of the books, Dr Rybeck has discovered thousands of "intellectual footprints" - dashes, dots, pencil scorings and exclamation marks which betray Hitler’s obsessions.

He claims the marginalia alone would provide enough information for several doctoral theses and could lead to a re-evaluation of Hitler and his beliefs.

Among the most heavily annotated volumes are books of Christian theology, marked in a way that shows the development of Hitler’s theories about God, man and superman. The evidence contradicts the commonly held view that the fhrer rejected Christian ideas out of hand.

Dr Ryback said: "What this adds to Hitler scholarship is the fact that he was seriously engaged with issues of substance and it was not just a passing interest."

In one volume by Fichte, a German theologian, the reader has underscored a passage which says: "Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity? Through his absolute identification with God".

The US collections include inscribed volumes from Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker, Dieter Eckhart, the playwright and National Socialist party member, and from Richard Wagner’s youngest daughter, Eva, who married the English anti-Semite Houston Chamberlain. There are books on military history, chemical warfare, vegetarian cooking and the arts, and detailed maps of countries, including the US.

Hitler was not known as a great lover of fictional writing. However, his favourite novelist was Karl May, who wrote schlock cowboy stories particularly for the German market.

In his quest to uncover Hitler’s intellectual life, Dr Ryback has also pored over the cache of 80 books on occultist subjects which belong to Brown University in Rhode Island.

The collection was found in the burnt-out remains of Hitler’s Berlin bunker by a US soldier, and kept in his attic until 1979, when his nephew decided to donate the collection to the University library.

One of the most heavily- marked books is Magic, by Ernst Schertel, an author whose name is associated with sadomasochism, satanism and flagellation.

In thick pencil, the reader marked a passage which said: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world".

One of the most intriguing questions in the story of Hitler’s forgotten library is the issue of whether a portion of the fhrer’s books is still secretly held in Moscow. Dr Ryback has heard rumours of a secret depository in a church in Moscow, where thousands more of Hitler’s precious books are stored.

The historian believes that, if they were ever found, these volumes could shed even more light on the intellectual development of the 20th century’s most notorious despot and mass murderer.

Dr Ryback said: "This doesn’t make him a better man. It may make him a deeper thinker, but it does suggest a man who was intellectually engaged.

"It isn’t the image of the raving lunatic that has been promoted in history."