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By Jim Fitzgerald Associated Press
NEW YORK — Heinrich Himmler was just 27 when he studied a copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The man who would eventually order the construction of the Auschwitz concentration camp evidently liked what he read. Himmler’s copy of “Mein Kampf” has been donated to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and historians say his annotations reveal the ideology that propelled him to the head of the Nazi police.
“It shows that the doctrine of antisemitism, nationalism and even how to get rid of the Jews was already being considered by Himmler as well as Hitler in the 1920s,” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, chairman of the museum’s board, said Friday.
Himmler underlined a passage in which Hitler writes that the gassing of 12,000 to 15,000 Jews might have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Germans in World War I, said Richard Breitman, a Himmler biographer and history professor at American University in Washington. “He took the racial ideology lock, stock and barrel,” Breitman said. “It’s another line of continuity in early Nazi ideology to the policies of the Nazi regime and eventually to the Holocaust.”
Himmler began reading the book, the second volume of Hitler’s manifesto, in 1927, the same year he was named deputy leader of the secret police. Where Hitler wrote that racial intermingling was a threat to the “higher” race, Himmler added in the margin, “The possibility of de-miscegenation is at hand.”
“De-miscegenation presumably involved eliminating the source of racial intermingling,” Breitman wrote in a draft for an article to be published in the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The historian said scholars had been unaware of the book’s existence.
Morgenthau said the donor, a New Yorker who wished to be anonymous, found the book in his father’s possessions and offered it to the year-old museum in Battery Park. “It’ll be displayed,” he added. “It’s part of the story of the rise of Nazism.”
