Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
A Constant Reader
By John Gross
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
by Timothy W. Ryback
Knopf, 278 pp., $25.95
In 1942 an American journalist called Frederick Oechsner published a book about Hitler entitled This Is the Enemy . It included an account of Hitler's personal library, based on interviews Oechsner had conducted with the Führer's associates while working as the United Press International correspondent in Berlin. And the first thing he made clear was that the library was a very substantial one. Hitler's books were divided between his official residence in Berlin and the Berghof, his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, and there were over 16,000 of them—an estimate that subsequent scholarship has confirmed.
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