When Hitler committed suicide, he had sixteen thousand books. Currently, about 1,300 are preserved in the United States, between the Library of Congress and that of Brown University. They are books underlined and with his annotations in the margins of the pages. What does a person's library say about its owner? This is the question that the documentary The Books Hitler Didn't Burn aims to answer, which Channel 33 broadcast on Wednesday night. It's worth recovering it from the 3Cat platform. Produced by German public television and the Arte channel, it delves into Hitler's book collection with Timothy Ryback, the world's leading expert on his library. Hitler was a great reader and knowledgeable about European literature and the history of science. But in no way does the documentary try to investigate his tastes. The documentary asks more ambitious questions: what do these books tell us about the origin of Hitler's murderous ideas? What do they tell us about the current far-right?Hitler preserved publications that Nazism had burned. Also revealed are all the businessmen who gifted the genocidal dictator with books and left the trace of their dedications. From a guide to Berlin written by a Jewish cultural critic to a vegetarian cookbook, passing through a treatise on urban heating systems and a manual on how to improve cigar factories.Hitler has often been considered an ideologue, but the documentary shows how the dictator fed on cultural currents of the time that extended beyond Germany and influenced many other leaders and their immigration laws. The documentary recovers the underlined passages from Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen; Fire and Blood, by Ernst Jünger, or The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, among other titles. The text is juxtaposed with archival footage of Hitler and Nazism, and the result is very impactful. It is sickening to discover how some of the ideas that emerge from Hitler's library connect with current discourses by Vox or Aliança Catalana. The documentary shows how some of these books are still used by far-right criminals. It also explains the origin of the replacement theory and how Nazism used it.But the documentary is not limited to an exercise in memory: it highlights how current media are repeating the strategy. It delves into books that talk about eugenics, analyzes antisemitic literature with experts, and highlights the texts that Hitler read before launching the genocide. The ideas contained in Hitler's three great libraries, in Berlin, Munich, and his Alpine residence, are still chilling today. The Books Hitler Didn't Burn is not a look at the past but at our present to demonstrate how all his theses were already there before Hitler. And how they still endure.
