Haunting

Hitler’s Bedside Reading

The favorite books he kept on his nightstand.

Hitler is better known for burning books than reading them. But at the end of the war, his library of 16,000 titles was shipped to America and they still languish in great unread stacks in the Library of Congress, Yale University, and elsewhere. Among the volumes of anti-Semitism and crazy race theories there are great American favorites, like Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and schoolboy favorites like Cervantes' Don Quixote. Author Timothy Ryback has sifted through the books and come up with the Fuhrer’s favorites, the ones he returned to time and again—even what he was reading in the bunker before he killed himself. Grisly and fascinating.