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Hitler's Private Library

Hitler's Private Library

The Books that Shaped his Life

Summary

He was, of course, a man better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, aged 56, Adolf Hitler owned an estimated 16,000 volumes - the works of historians, philosophers, poets, playwrights and novelists.

For the first time, Timothy W. Ryback offers a systematic examination of this remarkable collection. The volumes in Hitler's library are fascinating in themselves but it is the marginalia - the comments, the exclamation marks, the questions and underlinings - even the dirty thumbprints on the pages of a book he read in the trenches of the First World War - which are so revealing.

Hitler's Private Library provides us with a remarkable view of Hitler's evolution - and unparalleled insights into his emotional and intellectual world. Utterly compelling, it is also a landmark in our understanding of the Third Reich.

Reviews

  • Elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating
    Ian Kershaw

About the author

Timothy W. Ryback

Timothy W. Ryback is the co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at Leiden University in The Netherlands. His previous books include the highly acclaimed Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and was described by Ian Kershaw as ‘elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating’, and The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000. He has been involved with several institutions dealing with international affairs and served as a lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. He has also written for the Atlantic, the New Yorker and the New York Times. He and his wife reside in Paris.
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