The Books He Didn't Burn plot
On May 10, 1933, books were publicly burned in Germany. This action against the "un-German spirit" was directed against Jewish and other exiled writers. Since Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933, all opponents of the National Socialist regime had been brutally persecuted. Was Adolf Hitler also a book hater? Little is known about the fact that the dictator and mass murderer owned 16,000 books at the end of his life. Hitler had private libraries in Berlin, Munich, and Berchtesgaden. Some 1,300 of these books are now in the United States, some of them annotated and underlined by Hitler. What do these books tell us about the sources of his National Socialist delusions and about the continuing impact of far-right violence here and now?