The Books that Shaped his Life

Hitler's Private Library

A brilliant and deeply resonant exploration of Hitler's reading habits; a unique exploration of his life; and a landmark in the study of the Third Reich.

Elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating

Lively and entertaining survey of the dictator's reading ... a wealth of fascinating detail

Ryback has made an original and interesting contribution to the study of this monster, not least by showing that, in some respects, he was just like many of the rest of us

Ryback's...volume is unique in its focus on a limited number of books and in the forensic attention he lavishes on them

the nicely observed snapshots of his private life in which books played so big a part make this biblio-biography far more interesting than it looked when I first picked it up

Ryback has been able to draw a portrait of Hilter the reader, meticulous, critical and compulsive.

A fine analysis of the reading habits of a man whom the historian Ian Kershaw has called 'one of the most impenetrable personalities of modern history

A fascinating exercise in historical deconstruction

Ryback has created an intelligent companion to the countless existing biographies of Hitler

Financial Times, History books of the year

This fascinating study offers a chilling insight into the mind that conceived such unspeakable horrors.

Timothy W. Ryback is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book for 1999, and he has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is the co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague and the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, where he currently lives.

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.

Timothy W. Ryback

Frighteningly compelling ... the feel and pace of a court-room thriller. As it approaches its climax, you almost believe this dogged, decent man is going to win through ... superbly researched and tautly written

Tremendous ... Ryback's tenacity as forensic researcher and huge storytelling flair make this a compelling page-turner

Gripping – and thoroughly chilling … The haunting question at the heart of this book is this: if there had been a few more like Hartinger … was there any way the Nazi terror might have been averted? … a fascinating reconstruction

The genius of the book is to present Ryback’s thorough research as a kind of duel between Hartinger and Wäckerle, adopting some of the conventions of modern crime drama … few [Germans] have been held up as war heroes. Ryback’s brilliant book makes a powerful case for honouring Hartinger, an honest man in dishonest times

Gripping … anyone who thinks that Nazism came to power legally and without violence needs to read this account

Forensic, unflinching and utterly compelling … the story of the first killings at Dachau has scarcely been more urgent

An extraordinary, gripping and edifying story told extraordinarily well. I read it with a sense of amazement at the capacity of one good man to stand tall in the face of evil

Richard Bernstein, author of Dictatorship of Virtue

Amazing … This is history come alive in your hands

Horrifying and heartbreaking … By recounting such striking heroism, he allows us at least to ponder whether, had more good Germans come forward, it all might just have been stopped

Inspiring ... In the gathering shadow of the Holocaust, Josef Hartinger's dogged decency may redeem the German race

Geoffrey Robertson QC, author of Crimes Against Humanity

All the more startling and important for bringing to life an episode so little known

Raymond Bonner, author of Anatomy of Injustice

Alan Riding, author of And the Show Went On

And One Man’s Race for Justice

At 9am on 13 April 1933 deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau, where four prisoners had been shot. 
 
The SS guards claimed the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found convinced him that something was terribly wrong. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor only ten weeks previously but the Nazi party was rapidly infiltrating every level of state power. In the weeks that followed, Hartinger was repeatedly called back to Dachau, where with every new corpse the gruesome reality of the camp became clearer. 
 
Hitler’s First Victims is both the story of Hartinger’s race to expose the Nazi regime’s murderous nature before it was too late and the story of a man willing to sacrifice everything in his pursuit of justice, just as the doors to justice were closing.

Timothy W. Ryback

Praise for Hitler's First Victims

Frighteningly compelling ... the feel and pace of a court-room thriller. As it approaches its climax, you almost believe this dogged, decent man is going to win through ... superbly researched and tautly written

Tremendous ... Ryback's tenacity as forensic researcher and huge storytelling flair make this a compelling page-turner

Gripping – and thoroughly chilling … The haunting question at the heart of this book is this: if there had been a few more like Hartinger … was there any way the Nazi terror might have been averted? … a fascinating ...

Frighteningly compelling ... the feel and pace of a court-room thriller. As it approaches its climax, you almost believe this dogged, decent man is going to win through ... superbly researched and tautly written

Tremendous ... Ryback's tenacity as forensic researcher and huge storytelling flair make this a compelling page-turner

Gripping – and thoroughly chilling … The haunting question at the heart of this book is this: if there had been a few more like Hartinger … was there any way the Nazi terror might have been averted? … a fascinating ...

Frighteningly compelling ... the feel and pace of a court-room thriller. As it approaches its climax, you almost believe this dogged, decent man is going to win through ... superbly researched and tautly written

Tremendous ... Ryback's tenacity as forensic researcher and huge storytelling flair make this a compelling page-turner

Gripping – and thoroughly chilling … The haunting question at the heart of this book is this: if there had been a few more like Hartinger … was there any way the Nazi terror might have been averted? … a fascinating ...

Books by Timothy W. Ryback

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