The Book

The other day, my office manager walked into my office holding a thin book in German, with gothic letters on the cover. It was a book like many in our library’s collection, a book published in 1933 discussing the kind of education necessary in Hitler’s New Germany. The pages were replete with terms like “Volk,” (people) “Blutsgemeinschaft” (community of blood) and “Rassenhygiene” (racial hygiene) - standards terms from the Nazi lexicon. In short, it was another example of Nazi era racial and nationalistic ideology. However, there was something different about this particular book. Pasted on the inside cover was an ex libris sticker. Not just any ex libris sticker. In shades of brownish-gray, this sticker was adorned with the Nazi eagle, the swastika, oak leaves and an acorn. Written under the illustration in bold and stylized print was the name of the owner of the book, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler had a large library, estimated at no less than 16,000 items that was divided between two locations - his official residence in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and his retreat on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden. Many of the books in his collection were gift presentations and probably were never read. Other books, it turns out were well thumbed, and as Timothy W. Ryback pointed out in an article in the Atlantic Monthly last year, Hitler’s choice of reading may have surprised some. Among other books, the fanatical anti-Christian Fuhrer apparently spent much time reading a book entitled Worte Christi or “Words of Christ.” It is well documented in several of the biographies written about Hitler, that he particularly liked the novels by Karl May. These are stories about Native Americans and desert Arabs written by a European, who used more of his imagination than first hand knowledge about his subjects to shape his narratives. No doubt such books contributed to forming Hitler’s view of the world. The book we received on education in the New Germany, printed on quality paper that over the last 70 years had yellowed somewhat, did not look as if had been read very often.

In the wake of Hitler’s suicide in 1945 and the defeat of Nazi Germany about 1200 books from Hitler’s library were brought to the Library of Congress in Washington, where they remain today as part of the rare book collection. The rest of the library seems to have disappeared. Undoubtedly, Allied soldiers took many other volumes as souvenirs. The volume that reached us at Yad Vashem was one such item. In the letter that accompanied the book, the sender wrote that her father, a former member of the RAF must have taken the book for himself. It had remained in his possession until he passed away, and she sent it to us hoping to “find a final resting place” for it.

After looking through the book, I laid it and the accompanying letter on my desk. And as I do most days at around 13:15, I opened the cabinet behind my desk and took out the small prayer book I use for Mincha services. I went upstairs and joined the daily minyan we have at Yad Vashem. After the service, when I came back to my office it dawned on me that the last two books I had handled were one owned by Hitler and a sidur. How could two books be more diametrically different? One addresses the issue of educating the “master race,” whereas the other addresses the Master of the Universe. One puts man at its center, the other G-d.

In his wildest dreams I doubt that Hitler ever thought that someday one of his personal books would end up in a library in the Jewish state of Israel. I doubt if he or any Jew going through the Holocaust would have foreseen that the director of that library would handle one of his books, lay it down and then take up a sidur and attend a Mincha prayer service in a place that seeks to document and understand the crimes Hitler and his regime perpetrated against the Jews.

I received the copy of Hitler’s book during the days we were poised to go public over the Internet with our database of Holocaust victims’ names. On the more philosophical level, when I think about the database, I see it as a refutation of Hitler’s plans to obliterate the memory of the Jewish people, since it embodies the preservation of an important aspect of our national memory and the identity of roughly half of his victims. Given the depth and scope of the tragedy of the Holocaust it would be sacrilegious to crow about how the Jews ultimately defeated Hitler. But the fact that one of his personal books is sitting in Jerusalem, in the Yad Vashem Library, long after he killed himself; and the fact that we are continuing the sacred work of making known the identities of his Jewish victims, should at least give us pause; such pause may help us appreciate the sanctity of life, the preciousness of memory and the ongoing miracle of our continued existence as a people.

Dr. Robert Rozett

This article originally appeared in a slightly edited version in the Jerusalem Report, February 21, 2005

 

top