Why do our societies tend to create certain forms of prejudice, certain forms of racism over and over again?

You will not replace us!

Can literature provide a handbook for mass murder?

In the spring of 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

And soon the most devastating war in history would come to a close.

But its ending also brough a desperate search for answers.

How could an apparently civilized and progressive European nation perpetrate a war that would result in over 17 million deaths, including 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust?

From the very beginning, Hitler presented himself as chosen by fate and God and the sole creator of his own worldview.

In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler's nearly 800 page, two volume manifesto, he mentioned no predecessors and doesnt offer a single footnote.

After Hitler's death, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division discovered around 3000 books in a salt mine near his private Alpine residence.

Some contained the Führer's personal comments and underlined passages.

Can these books provide clues to the source of Hitler's murderous world-view And what do they tell us about right wing extremism today?

Historian Timothy Ryback advises governments and institutions on historical justice and trauma.

Ryback is also the world's foremost authority on Hitler's library, which is part of the “Third Reich Collection”, currently held at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Hitler once said: “When a person gives, they have to take and I take what I need from books.” We don't know what was going on in the mind, but I think with the books and allows us to at least understand the ideas that were feeding what was going on in that mind.

The Library of Congress, we're talking about 1200, talking about 1300 books.

That's not even a 10th of Hitler's entire collection.

We know by the end of his life he had books in a private library, one in Berlin, in his Munich apartment, and then at the Berghof, his Alpine retreat.

The ones at the Berghof were literally picked apart one by one.

American soldiers, French soldiers, took them home and souvenirs.

I've been chasing them down all over.

All over the world and they keep popping up.

Trying to understand the role of books in his life and his collection, you always look for forensic evidence.

I got access to Hitler's tax returns.

He didn't pay taxes after becoming chancellor, but until that time he did.

And after political travel, his single greatest tax write off was for books.

I found an insurance policy for his apartment in the in the Prinzregentenstraße And along with his artwork, there's a there's a separate provision in the insurance policy for his book collection.

Our whole notion going back to the ancient Greeks that art, beauty, literature ennobles the human spirit.

And Hitler's library turns this whole thing on its head.

So, Tim, you've pulled about 60 of our very prime pieces within the Third Reich collection as they pertain to and off Hitler.

We have about 1200 left here.

What type of narrative did those books essentially draw or tell us or illustrate about Hitler's collection?

If anything, it tells you how eclectic Hitler's interests were, and also the fractured nature of of his intellectual pursuits.

He never he never even completed high school and he in some ways, he spent his entire life trying to compensate for this.

Now this is a guidebook to Berlin.

One of the great ironies is that Max Osborne, he was a Jewish cultural critic at the time.

His books were burned while the rest of Osborne's books were being burned in these heaps in Munich and Berlin, this one was sitting in Hitler's private apartment.

This is a book that was given to Hitler by Ernst Jünger What's interesting is we know Remarques “All Quiet on the Western Fron” The great anti-war novel.

Jünger was the polar opposite.

He went through the same experience but came to the conclusion that this was the greatest human experience one could ever have.

It's called “Fire and Blood”.

Fire on blood.

And here you do find in the pages where you see Hitler marking specific passages about actually the powe of the experience at the front.

When you say, where did this come from, these horrific ideas, these horrific actions, ultimately?

You know, we're looking at them on the table here.

“Here we go to battle, to impress new conclusive seals into the liquid wax of the world.

Everyone can see that what is to be created here is something big created by fire and blood.” What I think is especially important about Hitler's private library is that a human life is measured in decades.

Books last centuries, if not millennia.

It's the reification of the ideas of both individuals that also the zeitgeist.

They tell you less about the history of a society than they do about the values of it.

What does a library say about its owner as well as the er in which the books were written?

David Nirenberg is a historian and the author of a highly acclaimed study on anti-Judaism from ancient times up until the present day.

The history of anti-Judaism is very long and very, significant.

The Holocaust is unimaginable without this long history of thought.

But it's not necessary becaus of this long history of thought.

The past is what we're born into.

It shapes our thinking.

But it doesn't determine what happens next.

And so one of the thing that thinking about the history of our ideas, studying Hitler's library, thinking about the history o anti-Judaism can do for us today is it can make us aware of how that past is shaping our many potentials in the present, and it can maybe help us avoid certain potentials we couldn't have avoided if we weren't aware of that past.

As a young man, Hitler often visited the Austrian National Library in Vienna, one of Europe's biggest libraries.

Not many would believe that European high culture and the Nazis homicidal hatred could go hand in hand.

But does Hitler's book collection tell a different story?

Shortly after World War One, Hitler made his first appearance on the political stage in Munich as a customs officers son who served in the lower military ranks.

Hitler was a political novice and a blank page.

Prior to the war, Hitler mostly borrowed books from public libraries.

But in Munich he began creating his personal private library.

And in some ways, the story of his own political rise to power mirrors the story of another book.

In the Hitler Library there are inscriptions in hundreds of books.

But I would say the single most insightful inscription in any Hitler book is in this hardbound copy of “Peer Gynt,” and it says "Dedicated to There are few people who could ever call, consider Hitler a friend, let alone a “dear friend.” Eckart was more than a friend to Hitler.

He was he was a mentor.

He was a father figure.

He was a singular person in Adolf Hitler's life.

A lot of Hitler's future supporters were introduced to him through Eckart and through Eckart's connection.

Eckart was very take with the character of Peer Gynt and wanted to adapt it to the stage.

You can understand how a story like tha spoke to Hitler as a young man.

“Peer Gynt” is living in this rural setting and he sets out with an ambition to become king of the world.

Hitler at that time was also a young man from backwoods Austria, increasingly coming into circles of power.

Eckart's stage adaptation of Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" became one of the most widely performed plays in Germany at that time.

Eckart took Hitler in and he allegedly bought Hitler his first trench coat, he took Hitler on his first airplane ride, to his first theater performance in Berlin, which was a performance of Peer Gynt.

Besides his notoriety as a playwright, Eckart also penned an anti-Semitic paper and threw his support behind the Nazi Party.

After Germany's defeat in World War One, he dreamed of a dictator who would restore the country to glory as a world power.

And he recognized Hitler's talents as a populist.

“A man who likes the sound of a machine gun needs to lead the country.

The masses need to feel fear.

An officer is no good to me, is the people, has no respect for them anymore.

The best thing would be a worker who puts his money where his mouth is.

He doesn't need much sense as politics is the stupidest business in the world.” Peer Gynt when he stands out, is this country bumpkin who goes on to great success, but also causing great misery and destruction.

When Hitler first came on the scene, he was something of a joke in political circles, not taken seriously.

Eckart used to take Hitler to these parties and introduce him and say, “this man is the future of Germany.

One day the entire world will be talking about him.” The Bechsteins were certainly not the last big names in German industry to sponsor Hitler.

From the mid 1920s, the publishers Bruckmann run by Hugo Bruckman backed the aspiring politician, and his wife Elsa became a devoted admirer of Hitler.

“Our governments, our art, all walks of life have become voluntary slaves of the Jews.” In 1930, steel magnate Fritz Thyssen a supporter of Hitler for years, financed the “brown house” in Munich, which would serve as Nazi Party headquarters.

Until the end of the war, German industrialist made good money with the Nazis.

And many immortalized themselves in Hitler's library by gifting him a book.

Germany today appears to be beaten.

Hitler: out.

Swastikas: gone.

Nazi propaganda: off the air, you'll see ruins.

You'll see flowers.

You'll see some mighty pretty scenery.

Don't let it fool you.

You are up against something more than tourist scenery.

You are up against German history.

It isn't good.

Germany is often praised for how it has dealt with its Nazi past, but is its reputation as a “champion of historical reckoning” deserved?

According to a survey from 2022, 49% of Germans believe it is time to put an end to the examination of its Nazi past.

In 2019, almost 29% of all those questions claimed that their forefathers helped Nazi victims during the war.

According to realistic estimates, only 0.3%, in fact, did.

the Germans own distancing from Nazi history was made evident in the statemen by politician Alexander Gauland Hitler wrote a large number of annotations in a book by the English writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain about composer Richard Wagner.

Wagner was Chamberlain's father-in-law and Hitler idolized him.

To Chamberlain, Wagner was the only modern artist who expressed true German culture, and that group solely responsible for corroding German culture was the Jews.

In reference to Richard Wagner, Chamberlain writes “The Jew, this apostle of progress, is the born and sworn enemy of all regeneration.

A Germany that wishes to recognize its true nature first has to destroy this demon inside itself.” Since 1925, Hitler had regularly been visiting the Wagner Spiele in Bayreuth, which, even today, attracts visitors who will pay up to several thousand euros for a ticket.

Hitler wrote a note in his copy of Chamberlain's book on Wagner that reads: “One must pay a high price for the Bayreuth experience, so that a regular mortal is unable to have it.” How did we get this idea that out of Hitler can be excluded from Western intellectual history?

In 1923, Hitler, a rising far-right wing politician, attempted a coup in Munich and failed miserably.

He was arrested, along with other perpetrators for the killing of several police officers.

While this crime should have ended Hitler's political career, a cour that was supportive of the coup sentenced him to just five years in jail.

He served less than one.

While in prison he invented the figure of Adolf Hitler as the world would come to know him.

Hitler famously called his time at Landsberg “my higher education at state expense”, and he was very nicely accommodated in a suite of rooms on the second floor, and treated as a celebrity when he was there, had a steady stream of guests and visitors, many of them bringing books.

He was given a biography of Julius Caesar and another of Frederick the Great.

There these racial treatises by "Rassengünther" who was basically the godfathe of the notion of racial hygiene under the Nazis.

The electricity was cut off in the prison after eight oclock.

Well, they allowed the electricity to continue to run in Hitler's quarter so that he could read at night.

I actually think there are deeper motivation for Hitler writing “Mein Kampf”.

You have to imagine who he was in the early 1920s.

He had dropped out of school, he did not have formal education.

He had a goal of becoming an artist.

And then went into the army an spent four years at the front.

And he comes out sort of as this half-educated war veteran, but also with a lot of insecurities.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, an early supporter of Adolf Hitler, tells this story on his first encounter.

You know, having him over and noticing that Hitler did not even know how to handle his cutlery with the table.

He gets served a glass of red wine and he adds sugar to it to sweeten it.

So this is a man without any social sophistication.

“Mein Kampf”, part of the motivation for writing it was to simply give him some kind of, quote unquote, “intellectual credibility” and a way of centering himself as the foundation of the future of the party.

“When my mother died, fate, at least in one respect, had already made its decisions.

In the last months of her sickness I had gone to Vienna to take the entrance exam for the Academy.

I was so convinced the time would be successful, that when I received my rejection, it struck me like a bolt from the blue.

When I presented myself to the rector, the gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted showed no talent for painting and that my ability obviously lay in the fields of architecture.

It was incomprehensible to him that I had never attended a school of architecture, or receive any other training in building” “I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital presented, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats and everywhere the eternal spirit of discord in humanity, Jews and more Jews.

To me, the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration.” Did Hitler's words shock German readers in 1925?

Othmar Plöckinger is the co-publisher of a critical edition of Hitler's “Mein Kampf”, “My Struggle”.

He's been studying this boo and its impact for over 20 years German right wing extremists have killed more than 200 people since Germany's reunification in 1990.

By far the highest number in Western Europe.

Is racism a fringe phenomenon in Europe's intellectual and cultural history?

Or does it actually lie at the heart of it?

In 1684, French philosopher François Bernier was the first person to use the term “race” to classify people.

The centuries-old social practice of exclusion and devaluation of groups now gained an apparent scientific basis.

“Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the white race.

The Yellow Indians do have a meager talent.

The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.” This quote is from the German philosopher of the enlightenment, Immanuel Kant.

In the 18th century, intellectuals debated new concepts of liberty, human rights, and common sense, but the discussion excluded the rights of women and slavery in the European colonies.

As the slave trade reached its zenith, almost none of the enlightenment philosophers criticized this development.

Due to the slave trade and colonialism, one burning question arising among elites: How are children of whites and non-whites to be judged on the scale of human value?

In the mid-nineteenth century, French Count Arthur de Gobineau wrote a book on this subject that made him famous: “An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races”.

Gobineau introduced the major motif that Hitler will later reproduce in “Mein Kampf”.

To the Count, the decisive drivin force in history is not politics or the military, but the mixing of races.

Superior in Gobineau's eye, the white race must therefore protect itself from mixing with the other supposedly inferior races.

In the years to come, many authors would refer to Gobineaus ideas and develop them further.

Many of these books were published by Julius Friedrich Lehmann in Munich.

Julius Lehmann, in the 1920 and 30s was a leading publisher of medical textbooks in Germany, so this was a very credible publishing house used by medical schools, by doctors.

But he also began publishing books on racial hygiene, became an early supporter of Adolf Hitler, and you find books from the early 20s inscribed b Julius Lehmann to “Herr Hitler”.

You know, more than 50 books, without question the larges number of books given by anyone in Hitler's circle, were those by Julius Lehmann.

This is the book thats a translation of Madison Grant, “The Passing of the Great Race”, which Hitler described in a letter to Madison Grant, reportedly as “my bible”.

It is inscribed to Hitler from Lehmann who's a publisher.

And this, I would argue, is one of the most significant books, certainly the most significant book in your collection, but also in Hitler's entire library.

This text is still used today by right-wing perpetrators to justify their murders.

“We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America an ‘asylum for the oppressed are sweeping the nation towards a racial abyss.” Madison Grant ran in very, very consequential what you call, you know, blue- blood social circles in New York City.

He was part of that white establishment that existed at that time.

What Madison Grant chos in his pseudo-scientific fashion is that the Nordic Europeans had actually been part of creating all of the great empires the Greek culture, the Roman Empire.

He takes it to the Persian Empire and even into India and China.

And what Madison Grant basically argues is that through immigration and throug a mixing of the races, it's led to a dilution of the superior Nordic race.

Because of a work by an American scholar, the American Union set a fixed immigration quota.

It prefers people from Scandinavian countries, from England and Ireland.

The Union does not allow any old Polish Jew to enter, but counts every single person.

Madison Grant's book was an absolute bestseller in the United States went through multiple editions, and had such an impact that when the U.S.

bega revisiting its immigration laws, Madison Grant was brought in as an advisor to set up the quotas for the different countries.

In 1924, the United States passed a new immigration law.

Asians were no longer allowed to enter the country.

This racial ban was accompanied by a campaign of hate against Chinese workers, who only decades before had helped build the country's transcontinental railroad.

The U.S.

also put a strict limit on the entry of Mediterranean and Eastern Europeans as well as Jews, to the country.

These immigration laws were designed to guarantee a majorit of white Anglo-Saxon Americans, “Where two races occupy a country side by side, one typ gradually breeds the other out.

Large families among the newly arrived population are still the rule.

The result is that one class or type in a population expands more rapidly than another, and ultimately replaces it.” After the attacks in Oslo and Utoya, Norway continues to mourn.

Crowds gathered to remember the 77 victims of the attacks.

A week ago on Friday, a 32-year-old detonated a bomb in Oslo's government district, and then shot participants at a Social Democratic youth camp.

In 2011, a right wing extremist killed 77 people in Norway.

As a motive, he state that so-called cultural Marxists were responsible for the Islamic fication of Europe.

His manifesto explicitly referred to Madison Grant.

A few years later, this idea of control replacement of the white population became know as the “Great Replacement Theory The term originated with the French writer Renaud Camus.

While Camus rejected violence in his writings, he coined the term that became a battle cry for the political right-wing.

I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement It does seem like the America that we kno and love doesn't exist anymore.

Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people.

That's what's happening, actually.

Let's just say it.

That's true.

And there are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like.

In today's media landscape, Fox News the U.S.s is highest rated cable news channe has pushed the “Great Replacemen in Germany, the publisher Götz Kubitschek, bestselling author Thilo Sarrazi and the Identitarian movement around the Austrian Martin Sellner are among those spreading this racist conspiracy theory.

Adolf Hitler, leader of a German national movement, is made chancellor of Germany, and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory.

Even though Chancellor Hitler is often considered by some to be power hungry and tempestuous, some German watchers believe he will be less dangerous in government office than he is in the street commanding his stormtroopers After Hitler's takeover of the government in January 1933, he had several communists, social democrats, and other political enemies arrested or killed.

Even further, a “cleansing” of his own party took place.

In June 1934, Hitler had Ernst Röhm, the leader of the S.A., his stormtroopers and almost 200 other men from his own faction killed.

Röhm's troops were notorious for being a group of thugs, and before Hitler's takeover, it was his most important political weapon.

But after the murder of Röhm, another organizatio gained power, the so-called SS.

It was considered an organization of the elite.

Its members consisted of doctors and academics.

Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was the son of the director of a humanistic grammar school in Munich.

The SS would order and carry out the most gruesome Nazi crime in the following years.

But in May 1933 the German academics were also involved.

An event was put into motion that would go down in history books as the prelude to the Nazis politics of extermination.

The Nazis drew their own conclusions from the theories of writers like Arthur de Gobineau and Madison Grant.

After taking over the government, they began to put theory into practice.

In January 1934, the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” was passed.

Up until 1945, up to 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized in Germany.

In particular, people with disabilities and so-called “mixed race people”.

In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, so-called “blood disgrace”, the marriage and sex between Jews and non-Jews was now punishable by law.

These laws paved the way for the mass murder to come.

A lot of reports justifying forced sterilization came from a notorious institute in Berlin: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics and Eugenics.

Eugenics as a field of research first came about in the 19th century in England and then the USA.

Darwin's doctrine of natural selection was transposed from animals onto humanity.

The result: only those people eugenicists considered worthy of life should survive and be allowed to reproduce.

The founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was the physician Eugen Fischer.

He co-wrote the book “Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene”, which was also found among the remnants of Hitler's library.

The book was published by Julius Frederick Lehmann and was partly based on pseudo-scientific research in the German colonies in Africa.

Manuela Bauche is a historian in Berlin.

For some years, she has been researching the history of the Institute.

“Any group of people can fall to disease.

Mostly these are selective processes, which rapidly worsen the condition of the people, and lead to its decay.

The realization tha these processes are occurring in our people to a serious extent, as in all civilized peoples, and that we are in a process of degeneration is well-known today.” Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama people in Namibia rebelled against colonial exploitation.

Fischer began his research shortly after the rebellion was crushed by German colonial forces.

As part of this war, the Germans banished the rebels to a waterless desert.

Tens of thousands died.

In 1908, Fischer had the graves of murdered Nama people dug up and took possession of their bones.

The skulls were sent to Germany for research purposes.

In the subsequent study, Fischer warned of cross-breeding of any kind, writing: “Every drop of blood from colored races that is absorbed by our people's bodies damages us irrevocably.” Fischer's institute became one of the most important think tanks for the Nazis racial politics.

Authors of the Nuremberg Laws explicitl referred to Fischer's research.

After the war, his career continued.

In 1952, the German Anthropological Association appointed Fischer an honorary member, and he spent his final years comfortably in a university town.

After he became chancellor, Adolf Hitler's private library, took on a new dimension.

Whereas in the 1920s Hitler compiled his librar based on his own interests, now he was showered with book gifts and personal dedications.

“To the leader of German elevation, the Siegfried of German hope and greatness.

Dedicated by the author.” “Dedicated to the strategic world champion.

For our beloved Fuhrer, with best wishes.” German writers, teachers and business people dedicated books to Hitler.

By the end of the 1930s, just before he forced the world into yet another war, Adolf Hitler's popularity in the German Reich reached its zenith.

In September 1939, Hitler gave the order to invade Poland.

In these newly conquered territories, the next level of his extermination program began.

In the first few weeks of war, German troops carried out a massacre near the city of Wejherowo, murdering patient from a local psychiatric clinic.

One month later, the SS under Heinrich Himmler killed Polish psychiatric patients with poison gas.

Hitler's euthanasia decree marked the beginning of the murder of so-called “unworthy” lives across the whole of Germany.

National Socialist doctors and their assistants killed about 70,000 people with disabilities and psychiatric illnesses.

Eugenics were presented as the supposed scientific basis for murder.

But they are not enough to understan the full extent of Nazi crimes.

At Brown university in the United States, remainders of Hitler's library are also being kept.

These books reveal further aspects of Hitler's reading behavior and the texts that directly preceded his homicidal madness.

So, Tim, welcome to Brown University Library, the Special Collections, this is the John Hay Library.

And what I've put on displa today is a very small selection of a gif that came to Brown in the 1980s.

It's a collection of about 80 books and some prints and drawings and watercolors that were supposedly liberated from the bunker in Berlin.

They were part of Hitler's private library.

They live in the vault, because they're considered valuable, but also sensitive.

We rarely bring them out.

What was fascinating about these is that there's a large number here, and this is what surprised me when I came, were books on, the spiritual and the occult.

I mean, these are th the “Prophecies of Nostradamus”, published in 1919.

So this is probably a book that Hitler acquired early in his career and ending up in the bunker with him, you know at the time of his suicide.

Yes.

And in this book in particular, this is from the author his name was Ernst Schertel, and you know, the “Theory and Practice of Magie” and this is about this is he talks about the demonic forces of the world.

And you'll find strikes in here again and again where he's referring to it.

“The man with the greatest force of imagination commands the world and create realities according to his will instead of being a slave to a bodiless empiricism.

The imaginative man, the magician, is the actual focus of the ectropic, the renewal of the world, the new birth of being.

The intellectual of today only has a scoffing smile for these things, as he no longer recognizes the deeper connections of reality.” In the Library of Congress, I kept coming across these various religious texts or even books on the occult.

I found other books in private collections that also related to these issues, but most consequentially at Brown University, there's a cache of 80 books.

And when I went there to look, I found probably a dozen books related to this topic, a lot of them with marginalia.

You start seein there is something going on here In 2017, Eric Kurlander published a renowned study on the belief in the supernatural in the Third Reich.

In trying to explain the Holocaust, I think there are three factors that together help explain how it could happen.

One is obviously the modern tradition of eugenics and biopolitics, the idea that you can recreate society by eliminating lesser or alien races.

There's the role of modern capitalism and imperialism.

The idea that you, have a righ as a dominant imperialist state to conquer or exploit territory and eliminate the people who are already there.

Those two factors are really important.

But given how widespread this preoccupation with science and eugenics and public health and empire and colonialism were among many powers in the 19th and 20th century, there's a third element, which I think explains why the elimination of the racial other and the subjugation of the racial other was so extreme in Nazism.

And that's where I think the supernatural thinking plays a role.

And if you take the group that was most persecuted, that's where the supernatura thinking was arguably strongest and most fantastical.

Jews will not replace us!

Jews will not replace us!

This idea that the Jew is a figure within our society that is trying to destroy or corrupt our society is a very ancient idea.

It's it's steepe into our religions, our ideals.

And Hitler was borrowing from these ideas.

The Jewish underground media mafia already started attacking me.

Today, those ideas remain very, very powerful.

THE BILLIONAIRE MAN The only way to unite all these bizarre ideas about Jews being behind every horrible thing that's happened throughout history when they're such a small, persecuted minority, is to use supernatural thinking, faith-based thinking.

In 1941, the Nazi wa against the Soviet Union began.

A few weeks later, one German soldier wrote home from the Eastern Front: “Everyone knows this fight against these subhumans, who was stirred to a rage by the Jews, was not only necessary, but also came at the right moment.

Our Fuhrer has saved Europe from a certain downfall.” The war against the Soviet Union broke the dam of homicidal violence wide open.

“Einsatzgruppen”, the mobile killing squads of the SS, systematically murdered Jews, Roma people, so-called “antisocials”, people with disabilities, along with many Soviets.

These murders took place wit the consent of the German Army.

These troops killed about 1 million people in total.

Then from 1942, these murders were organized at extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.

From the start, the Nazis were intent on not leaving any trace behind.

Beginning in 1942, they started testing methods to get rid of the masses of bodies.

While these experiments were taking place, Hitler received a book called “America in the Battle of the Continent” from Sven Hedin, a world famous Swedish author.

A personally signed copy was delivered to Hitler in October 1942.

Hedin was a real life adventure.

He would go into the most desolate parts of the world.

Hedin's books were international bestsellers.

He was really, at that time one of the most famous men on earth.

Hitler would have been reading, Hedin from his early years.

They met after he became chancellor.

I believe they had one meeting.

I do know that Hitler invited Hedin to speak at the 1936 Olympics, and he was there.

And the men had an ongoing relationship.

Hitler had enormous respect for him.

When you see Hitler' letters to him, he refers to him “Dr.

Sven von Hedin”.

Hedin not have a doctorate and he was not an aristocrat.

His name was just Sven Hedin.

But in some ways you see Hitler projecting this infatuation, this awe of this man.

“This book examine the politics of F.D.

Roosevelt.

Members of the US government have repeatedly emphasized that the country's main enemy is Germany.

It will become clear that Germany has always made an effort to remai on friendly terms with the young big country across the Atlantic, but that for centuries now, hostile tendencies have been appearing in the US.” What Hedin does in this book is to chart all of Hitler's alleged peace attempts in advance of September 1st, 1939, when the war broke out and it gives you a history of the Second World War the way it would have been written had the Nazis been left to to write the history.

“Roosevelt spoke of democracy and incessantly betrayed it.

This war will go down in history as President Roosevelt's war.” After reading this Hitler wrote a letter to Hedin, basically saying: “Yes, you have it!

When the world reads this, they will understand what really happened.” Hitlers ideas that the Jewish race offered an existential threa to the white and the Aryan race Was that was what we might call it, a form of what we today called the Great Replacement Theory.

That idea that this tiny minority, within our society is conspiring to destroy our own social makeup and ideals.

The Great Replacement Theory motivated the shooter who killed Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue.

He believed that the will that the Jews were doing was to try to replace the white, the white race in North America with Blacks and Muslims as the Great Replacement has motivated, I would say, every act o terrorism against Jews in Europe and in North America in the last decade, and against Muslims often as well.

The Great Replacement Theory believes, believes the only white people are responsible for progress in our society, and that the growth of a multiracial and multi-religious society is a threat to white people's existence and the health of our nation.

This has spread and infected the minds of so many.

It is a conspiracy theory used to stoke racially motivated violence all around the world.

It's not a marginal form of thought and I think we see it increasingly articulated by politicians.