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 Post subject: Hitler's private library.
PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 9:00 am 
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The obvious question raised by this book is: can reading have the power to civilise? Adolf Hitler was a voracious if undiscerning reader who owned an estimated 16,000 books, which were scattered round his various headquarters. At the end of the second world war, most of the collection was pillaged. From what remains, however, Timothy Ryback has tried to glean some insight into the emotional life, hatreds and enthusiasms of the Nazi leader.

There are few surprises. Rather than yield with humility to writers and their books, Hitler used them merely to bolster his preconceptions. One essential dislike, of course, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his soul: Jews. So he took what he wanted from such wretchedly anti-semitic tracts as Henry Ford's The International Jew and Paul Lagarde's German Letters, which advocated the 'removal' of Jewry from western Europe.

Hitler considered himself a thinker, but his 'painfully flawed grammar' and inability to spell correctly betrayed an autodidact's hand. He read selectively (and with catastrophic results) from the great philosophers he cited. Nietzsche was no proto-Nazi, yet the Führer used his Social Darwinism as justification for the Nazis' biological anti-semitism.

Ryback, an American historian, deduces that Hitler must have read one book a night, furiously supplementing his prejudices. His earliest reading matter came from his father's Wild West novels and historical romances. A lifelong favourite appears to have been the children's story Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch, in which a pair of troublemakers are ground up in a flour mill and fed to ducks.

Although Ryback has trawled diligently through the surviving 1,200 volumes of the Hitler collection held in the Library of Congress in Washington, he finds few signs of the dictator's presence in them. (He does, however, discover an inch-long black hair in a copy of an architectural guide to Berlin by one Max Osborn; it 'appears to be from a moustache', he tells us.) Yet Hitler's Private Library, the fruit of eight years' research, provides a warning against the dangers of blind adherence to ideology and the damage that a deal of selective reading can do.



http://snipurl.com/beg4n


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 9:06 am 
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I'm not sure I would ever want to see them let alone ever touch them. :(

I know how sacriledgistic ( that's a made up word by me.:oops: :D ) this sounds but I think I'd rather burn every copy. I wouldn't want anything that man ever owned to still remain on this earth.
To me, he was the devil incarnate. Pure evil and I would want rid of anything that ever helped him along his way. Books or not.

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PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 2:08 pm 
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The author asked the question if reading can have the power to civilise? I believe it can't: psychopaths can be intelligent but they have no emotions, at least not the proper ones.

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PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 6:00 pm 
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I agree with you there Durga.

Some people are intent on evil deeds through their own personal choices. They are what they are and have no wishes to change. These people you cannot help, nor can you change.

It's always the saddest fact of life that there are those willing and wanting to hurt, kill or maim for life others through wanton evil practises. :(

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God, The Universe, Consciousness, Love - whatever name it goes under - We all come from it, we are all connected to it, and in the end we all return to it. -annon.


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2009 9:07 pm 
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Well I am a Jew and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, for we are taught that to hate even one person diminishes us all for we are all made by "God. But honestly Mine Kampf, I always spell it wrong, was more than I could take.


I totally believe in this, and that man in the light of this was really in the end, just nothing.And the lives that were destroyed, the families shattered, the grief and pain, that can never be made right in this life:

In 1 Corinithians it says that one could be the most intelligent person alive, know all things, even speak in tongues of angels, but if he had not love, he was only as brass symbols clashing together, just worthless noise.
love hopes all things, believes in all things(good) and endures all things. it never fails.
I just wonder who he imagined he was to decide what was to become of another human being?
Even at the end, the coward he proved to be, he had Eva die with him.
So, really who cares about his vast library, other than those who still long to subjugate others?

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 9:38 am 
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Forgive me for being seemigly 'thick' ( which I am NOT ;) ) here, but if you believe in God, do you not also believe in the devil? as is also mentioned in the bible.
To believe in one and not the other is, to me, a little pointless.
If you do also believe in the devil ( or evil ) could it not be that Hitler was IT?

Maybe he was born mortal, like the rest of us. Maybe he was brought up in a very loving family - maybe a harsh one. Personally I've never had the inclin to even find out, but what he ended up as was down to one of four options.

# He was mentally ill.

# He made the choices personally and deliberabtely.

# He was made that way through his own blue print ( genes.

or

# He was the devil incarnate. ( If you believe in that )

Either way, no man/woman with a concience could have ever truly believed they were right to do half of the things he did. Let alone actually do them.
Even if he believed that to shift the doings of a job on to someone else that someohow removed him from the picture, he would have to fall into the 'mentally ill' category.

What I don't and never have understood, is how he persuaded so many people he was right!! HOW could these people not see what they were doing was going against every single rule of life and humanity itself. Behaving like robots and distancing themselves, or convincing themselves at the time he was right, does not excuse it, and it beggers belief they could even think for one moment it did.

Would I ever go so far as to not have ANY book regarding Hitler in my home? no, of course not, but I would never, ever, contemplate buying a book that tried to show him in a good light, misguided light, or misunderstood.
Nothing about that excuse for a human being could or should ever be misunderstood.

I know the Jewish faith believes in a world peace, and an end to all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease.

I think it says "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)

But to ask you all

Quote:
to hate even one person diminishes us all for we are all made by "God.


Is a little unrealistic in my opinion, when it comes to Hitler. :)

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 3:28 pm 
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Oh I implicitly believe in satan, the one cast from God's presence because he , being made, wanted to elevate himself above God.

God says in His Holy Scriptures that it is this enemy of His and all mankind that we are to fight in prayer and deed, " for our fight is not against flesh and blood but against principalities ....of the air."

He also says 'love your enemies and do good to those who do evil to you............

This is not blind silly love, but since God Himself is Love, what is meant by that is that , for God's sake, not mortal man, for the sake of Christ, who himself died on the cross forgiving those who sinned against HIm, for that reason we forgive and by loving, is meant doing good with no hope of getting good back.

God goes on to explain why, "For vengence belongs to God, He will repay." He will do against our enemies, what we cannot do.

That is not to say that we must sit idly by as our brothers did and be massacred and thrown into the ditches or burnt in the ovens. No way. We are to respect the lives God has given us and fight to protect ourselves, our families, etc. But never to go about hating nor promoting hate, nor turning our backs upon those, even evil persons that need help. We did not create life, we don't have the right to willy nilly hate and kill and destroy.

But we fiercely hate evil, and the evil done and fight it.
Our prime example of someone who was just a mortal is Abraham.

He went on a journey and when he came back to his dismay found his nephew,his family and all that belonged to them taken, all his family taken into slavery etc.

With the remaining men he had he made pursuit and hunted the enemy down, fought and defeated them and brought back to the minutest detail all that was stolen,all his kin.

Then after that the King of Sidon came to him to offer him this and that because a fear of Abraham had fallen on all the other low lifes. He refused, for he would take no glory for himself nor touch anything offered from an anemy. He gave glory to God alone.

As for Hitler, he ALLOWED the darkness that was a seed in his heart be fed with the flames of hate and evil. Each one of us could do that. Believe me, once a conscience is seared anything evil can happen. That is why gossip is so evil, it stirs up things and before you know it there is an all out war between people and sides are taken.

He did indeed become a devlish person and I am certain that he has received his recompense before the living God. But indifference and prejudice, not caring about one's neighbor all leads down this path, for if we turn our backs on doing what is right in every area of our lives, evil can sneak in and do great harm.

I think he needed to be dealt with as a child, but in the end , that which was deep in his heart came forth and bore fruit. I don't hate him though, I hate what he did and leave him to God.

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:10 pm 
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Sabra wrote:
As for Hitler, he ALLOWED the darkness that was a seed in his heart be fed with the flames of hate and evil. Each one of us could do that. Believe me, once a conscience is seared anything evil can happen. That is why gossip is so evil, it stirs up things and before you know it there is an all out war between people and sides are taken.





I'm sorry but I don't agree with that. Not everyone could be like Hitler. I certainly could not kill anyone or send an entire nation to the gas chamber. It's one thing hating someone who has been nasty to you and another thing torturing innocent people who are just different to you and done no harm to you whatsoever.

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 10:09 pm 
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Romans 12:9 tells us to "Abhor what is wicked, cling to what is good."

There is no question Hitler was bad, and that's an understatement to say the least, so we , as Christians, certainly can hate him and what he did.


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PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 10:55 pm 
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Totally agree with you there Katherine. Totally. :)

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God, The Universe, Consciousness, Love - whatever name it goes under - We all come from it, we are all connected to it, and in the end we all return to it. -annon.


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