The books that made Adolf Hitler
Hitler pretended he was a great intellectual but his mental calibre never progressed beyond genre young adult cowboy novels
The Allies recovered approximately 16,300 books from the Berlin Reich Chancellery and Hitler’s country home on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden. It is said that the Russians too gained possession of another huge store of books but the details of these collections remains sketchy.
The books, kept in archives in American universities and the Congress library, have attracted some attention from scholars, especially graduates of Harvard’s Weimar Studies department. One particularly readable account of these somewhat neglected archives is Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2009). It provides a biography of Adolf Hitler constructed from the various archives that hold whatever remains of Hitler’s once vast library.
Most of these books are untouched gifts. About seven thousand are well-thumbed books on military issues. More curious, are about a 1,000 extremely well-read novellas. It would appear that apart from cowboy novels, Hitler also loved romance novels in which virtuous secretaries married their difficult-tempered millionaire bosses. These volumes have plain covers, as Hitler didn’t want anyone…
