HOWZAT

Several dozen of these surviving Hitler books contain marginalia. Here I encountered a man who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a relentless tirade, a ceaseless monologue, pausing to engage with the text, to underline words and sentences, to mark entire paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside one passage, a question mark beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic series of parallel lines in the margin alongside a particular passage. Like footprints in the sand, these markings allow us to trace the course of the journey, but not necessarily the intent, where attention caught and lingered, where it rushed forward and where it ultimately ended.

In a 1934 reprint of Paul Lagarde’s German Letters, a series of late-19th-century essays advocating the systematic removal of Europe’s Jewish population, I found more than 100 pages of pencilled intrusions: from page 41, where Lagarde calls for the “transplanting” of German and Austrian Jews to Palestine, extending to ominous passages where he speaks of Jews as “pestilence”. “This water pestilence must be eradicated from our streams and lakes,” Lagarde writes on page 276, with a pencil marking bold affirmation in the margin. “The political system without which it cannot exist must be eliminated.”

Easily two-thirds of the collection consists of books he never saw, let alone read, but there are also scores of more personal volumes Hitler studied and marked. It also contains small but telling details. While perusing the volumes in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress, I came across one whose original contents had been gutted. The front and back boards were firmly secured to the spine by a heavy linen cover, with the title North, Central and East Asia: Handbook of Geographic Science embossed in gold on a blue background. The original pages had been replaced by a sheaf of cluttered documents: a dozen or so photonegatives, an undated handwritten manuscript titled The Solution to the German Question and a brief note typed on a presentation card that read:

My Führer, On the 14th anniversary of the day you first set foot in the Sternecker, Mrs Gahr is presenting to you the list of your fellow fighters. It is our conviction that this hour is the hour of the birth of our wonderful movement and of our new Reich. With loyalty unto death.

Sieg Heil!

The Old Comrades

The card bore no date, and the list of early Nazi-party members was missing, but the mention of “Mrs Gahr”, presumably the wife of Otto Gahr, the goldsmith whom Hitler charged with casting the first metal swastikas for the Nazi party, as well as the reference to the 14th anniversary of Hitler’s first appearance in the Sternecker beer hall, preserves in briefest outline the trajectory of Hitler from political upstart in 1919 to chancellor of the German Reich in 1933.

Hitler left no narrative of his own collection, no account of how one or the other volume came into his possession, or of its particular emotional significance, but the various inscriptions, marginalia and other details provide insight into their personal and intellectual significance for his life.

© Timothy W Ryback 2009

Extracted from Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, published by Bodley Head on February 5 at £18.99. To buy it for £17.09 (inc p&p), call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135

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