Library Inside

There is more than the description of a library to this book. Ryback goes into a fair amount of assessment of the thought of Hitler. He tells us when and how he acquired various books, and speculates about what Hitler got out of them from the marginal notes or markings. Ryback considers the occasion and the giver of some volumes, and thus speculates about Hitler’s personal relationships. On the whole this book adds something to our understanding of Hitler. How did this uneducated man, who never himself killed any person, manage to organize a following among Germans and people from most European countries to murder 6 million Jews, plus millions of others. What was he thinking, and how did he answer friends who remonstrated with him about the mistreatment of specific Jews?

I wonder how careful the author has been in checking his facts and translations. Surely, Christian Morgenstern (p. 42) wasn’t Jewish, would a Jew have that first name. The title of Ernst Junger’s book is Fire and Blood (cf illustration p. 81) not Blood and Steel (p. 80). While there is some question where Horst Wessel was shot, it definitely was not a bar room brawl (p. 103). The racist writer’s name was Moeller van (not von) den Bruck (p. 112) as the illustration on the next page clearly shows. And Ryback is aware of the difference between the Dutch van (from) and the German aristocratic von, because he comments on it in connection with Sven Hedin (p. 196); and Hedin did earn a doctorate, Halle 1892, presumably in geography. The Austrian chancellor’s name is spelled Schuschnigg not Schussnig (p. 152).

Rating: 4 / 5

I looked forward to reading this book immensely, and I was disappointed.

I highly recommend to read the following “CENSORED” books:

1) “THE HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY” by Arthur R. Butz.

2) “NOT GUILTY AT NUREMBERG” by Carlos W. Porter.

3) “FLASH POINT – Kristallnacht 1938. Instigators, victims and beneficiaries” by Ingrid Weckert.

4) “TREBLINKA – Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?” by Carlo Mattogno & Jürgen Graf.

5) “AUSCHWITZ: The First Gassing” by Carlo Mattogno.

Rating: 1 / 5

The man who had books burnt, read at least a book a night – according to Hitler himself und according to quite a few of his employees. His lecture included, among other things: Karl May, Sven Hedin, a big bunch of racist books and brochures, a whole lot on occult and military issues. What does his choice of literature say about the man who brought death and misery to so many million people? Very much, as Timothy W. Ryback shows in his book. He starts it with a few lines by Alexander Pope that begin with the words: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Adolf Hitler for sure is the best proof as to the perils of superficial education, the indiscriminate devouring of facts, fiction and falsities – and the incapacity to digest them. In an interview, Ryback credits Hitler with a “gutter intellect”. Hitler, says Ryback, was a man who could quote Schopenhauer and an obscure racist in one breath.

The background for this attitude is provided on the one hand by the intellectual insecurity that Hitler felt due to his inadequate school education, on the other hand by his arrogance as it had already become obvious in his book “Mein Kampf”. There, Hitler claimed, that it only had taken him a few years to accumulate the knowledge on which he built his ideology. Among his favourite books which he had close at hand in all his residencies, were encyclopaedias, Meyers and Brockhaus, in which Hitler often looked up things. His contemporaries used to marvel over and over again about the amount of facts and figures Hitler could spit out from memory.

Attempts to reconstruct Hitler’s reading habits by the leftover books from his various libraries are risky, as Ryback is well aware. Because the book collections have been dispersed after the war. Moreover, it’s not easy to determine which volumes Hitler really read personally. There are hardly any marginal notes and it’s not certain if all the detected underlined passages were really marked by Hitler’s own hand.

However, Ryback is proceeding with the required caution, he complemented his book researches with many interviews with eye witnesses, among them Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge. However, the latter knew more about Hitler’s reading habits than his particular choice of books.

In his not very thick book, Ryback puts the focus on books Hitler mentioned himself or whose lecture found expression in his speeches and monologues. Throughout his whole life Hitler liked to retreat to Karl May whose (invented Wild West) adventures, as Hitler said himself, distracted and comforted him in difficult situations. Moreover, he admired the real-life hero Sven Hedin and met him several times. Hitler also appreciated Ernst Jünger in whose descriptions of World War I Hitler saw reflections of his own experiences.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are often claimed and blamed to be the godfathers of nazi-ideology. However, Ryback points out, that in reality it was rather Fichte who met the national-socialist movement. In 1933, Leni Riefenstahl dedicated to her “dear Führer” a precious eight-volume-edition of Fichte’s writings. However, even more than by these famous philosophers was Hitler influenced by the brochures of the extreme right-wing publisher Lehmann, for example Paul Lagarde’s “Deutsche Schriften” (German writings).

As his great role model, Hitler named American car manufacturer and anti-Semite Henry Ford whose book “The International Jew” had very much impressed him und probably also influenced him while writing “Mein Kampf”.

Shortly before the “Untergang”, the fall of the Third Reich, Hitler was once again preoccupied with Prussian king Frederick the Great, whom he had admired all his life. Hitler hoped for a similar miracle as the one that had saved the House of Brandenburg during the Seven-Year-War, when the death of tsarina Elisabeth had literally saved Prussia in the last minute from extermination.

Whereas Ryback and others who preoccupied themselves after the war with Hitler’s libraries had to be satisfied more or less with remnants, there’s a very interesting report of a contemporary witness that Ryback added to his book. Frederick Oechsner, the correspondent of United Press International, had managed to have a pretty close look at Hitler’s private libraries in the “Reichskanzlei” in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s refuge in the Bavarian Alps. He published his observations in 1942 in the report “This is the Enemy”: According to it, both collections contained about 16 300 books. The first group, on military issues, about 7000 volumes, the second section – on art, theatre, architecture – about 1500 volumes. The third, big section was dedicated to books on astrology, esoteric and occult subjects. Among, them, “safely locked away”, as Oechsner writes (no idea, how, in this case, he could know about them), 200 photos of star constellations on the important days in Hitler’s life. The latter, claims Oechsner, Hitler hat marked with handwritten annotations and each one of them had its own envelope. Moreover: about 400 books on the church, almost exclusively on the catholic church, also 800 to 1000 volumes of pulp fiction: “Everything by Edgar Wallace”, Hedwig Courts-Mahler and Karl May.

Some of Oechsners remarks should surely be taken with a grain of salt. After all, his report served propaganda purposes. However, his sorting in fields of knowledge coincides all in all with several other listings of this kind, like Ryback’s own. Ryback “only” puts the emphasis on a few significant books and dedicates to them the attention they deserve. That’s an absolutely legitimate and respectable procedure, although the book that has, without the addendums, only 227 pages, could have been a bit more detailed.

It was the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin who delivered the central idea for Ryback’s book. In an essay on book collecting, Benjamin had stated, it weren’t only books which said something about the collector, but that, vice versa, a collection also enclosed the collector. An interesting but short-sighted view, in Ryback’s opinion. Because, there’s hardly a library which intactly survives its collector. It’s one of history’s ironies that this is true as well for the book collection of nazi-victim Benjamin as for Hitler’s own libraries.

Rating: 4 / 5