Trolling Hitler - A copy of The Nazi's plan-book for dealing with the Jews of United States and Canada

One of the workplace dangers of being a bookseller, is losing your sensitivity and excitement when handling rare, important and valuable books. Once in a while though, something crosses your hands that makes the world around you stand still and you can grasp in the air the historical weight of a book that finds itself in your hands.

One such book, was The 137-page report, “Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada” (Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada), compiled in 1944 by Heinz Kloss, a German linguist who specialized in minorities and visited the United States in the early 1930s. The cover, bears a diagonal warning “For Official Use Only”. On the verso is a bookplate with a stylized eagle perched on an oak branch clutching a laurel-wreathed swastika in its talons. It is framed, in bold-face type, “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.”

The book was part of a large collection of rare Judaica owned by a recently deceased Holocaust Survivor which we acquired. The thought of a Holocaust Survivor holding Hitler's own copy of his plan for the Jews of the United States, encapsulates for me much of Jewish History, with the diminutive Jewish Nation standing and observing from a distance the ruins of the great empires of it's enemies.

The provenance for this volume is from a Judaica Auction which took place in 2011. At the time, the New York Times wrote an article on this volume, the following is from their description of this copy: The Hitler book was among the thousands taken by American G.I.’s from the Nazi leader’s alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden in the spring of 1945. Most have ended up in attics, basements and bookshelves across America. One of the more notable examples I have seen is Hitler’s personal copy of Shakespeare’s collected works, 10 volumes bound in fine Moroccan leather with a swastika and the letters AH embossed on the spine. On occasion, these war trophies find their way onto the antiquarian book market.

The book underscores with stark statistical data how assiduous the Nazis were, even as late as 1944, in pursuing their goal of world domination as well as their designs for extending the geographic compass of the “final solution.” That such a volume found its way into Hitler’s personal library is as understandable as it is chilling.

“When a person gives they have to take,” Hitler once said. “And I take what I need from books.” Hitler was an obsessive reader from childhood, and his understanding of America was shaped in great part by his readings, in his youth, of the cowboy-and-Indian stories of the adventure novelist Karl May, and later in life of the anti-Semitic writings of Henry Ford. Hitler kept copies of Ford’s “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” on a table outside his office and included it in a list of books “every National Socialist should know.”

After reading “America in the Battle of the Continents,” a screed about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s alleged war mongering written by the Germanophilic Norwegian explorer Sven Hedin, Hitler sent the author a three-page letter thanking him for setting the record straight.

Hitler’s most valued book on America was “The Passing of the Great Race,” by a Columbia-educated eugenicist, Madison Grant, who claimed that American greatness, built on the Nordic stock of its founding fathers, was being eroded by the allegedly inferior blood of immigrant races. Hitler quoted liberally from Grant in his speeches and is said to have sent him a letter describing “The Passing of the Great Race” as “my bible.”

The Kloss report is a fitting addition to Hitler’s American reading list, but this particular book comes with a double-barbed moral hitch. What kind of price tag belongs on a book that would have, but for the defeat of the Nazis, provided a blueprint for the horrific consequences of similar data-collecting efforts across Europe? More problematic still, who would want to own such a book that was almost certainly perused and quite likely studied by Hitler during one of the ritual nocturnal reading sessions, usually with a cup of tea, in his upstairs study at the Berghof?

It would be best if the Kloss report were acquired by an individual or institution willing to donate it to a public collection, ideally, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. There it could join 1,200 other surviving volumes from Hitler’s private library and not only be readily accessible to scholars and historians but also occupy appropriate shelf space with an equally sinister companion book from Hitler’s private book collection, a 1925 German translation of Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race,” bearing a personal inscription to Hitler.