cryptogon.com

No, the Führer’s not in there, but his books are — lots of them. They’ve been there for 30 years. And inside one of them, a book on the occult, is a passage marked for special attention in Hitler’s own hand that is chilling even today.

But few know of this trove, much less look at it.

“We treat this collection the way we do every other collection,” says Samuel Streit, the library’s director of special collections. “We’ve never hidden it. They’re in our online catalog. We don’t have flashing lights saying, ‘Hitler’s library.’ But they’re there like anything else.”

A recent book has brought attention to it, however: Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, by Timothy Ryback. The author reports that Adolf Hitler’s library was vast, more than 16,000 volumes. The whereabouts of most of the books is a mystery, although most scholars believe they’re scattered around Russia. We do know that 1,200 of them are in the Library of Congress in Washington, 81 in the John Hay.

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Included in the collection is a book by Friederich Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose writings, some say, provided a basis for Hitler’s fervent nationalism and belief in Aryan supremacy. What you don’t find in Brown’s Hitler collection, Streit says, are fresh insights into his mind or character.

“There is nothing in anything that we have here that would contradict what is generally known about Hitler. He doesn’t say anything about, ‘Jews are good people.’ There is no refutation for anything he stood for.”

But there is unsettling substantiation. One notable subject represented in Brown’s Hitler library is the occult. And the most requested book in the collection is Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923) by Ernst Schertel. This book, as with some others, Hitler had marked.

“Like footprints in the sand,” Ryback writes of those notes in the margin, “they do not necessarily reveal the purpose of the journey, but they do allow us to see where his attention caught and lingered, where it rushed ahead, where a question was raised or an impression formed. In these books one finds Hitler’s pencil repeatedly drawn to passages related to the connection between the scientific and the spiritual, between the material and the immaterial.”

Hitler marked the margins of his books with vertical lines beside paragraphs or sentences he thought important. And one marked sentence in Magic is quite chilling, given Hitler’s history: