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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 to know that he was reading them.
A good portion of the collection is devoted to artistic matters, reflecting Hitler’s past ambition to be a painter and an architect. The line between art, religion, philosophy, mysticism and science was a blurred one for Hitler. He was a blow hot, blow cold kind of Catholic, and firmly against Popes leading armies. He relished prosecuting priests for sexual crimes and negotiating the political outcomes of these scandals with higher church officials. The collection housed suppressed writing of the Nazi leadership, such as Alfred Rosenberg’s plan to start a Nazi Church. Despite his antagonistic relationship with Rome, Hitler appeared privately amenable to Christian theology in his private reading. One church official, Alois Hudal, even attempted to win the Pope over to a fusion between Catholic and Nazi ideology. Hudal would be key to setting up the ‘rat-lines’, which allowed Nazi leaders to escape to South America using Catholic…
