The Jewish Chronicle

Hitler’s ‘US Holocaust blueprint’ revealed

- BY DANIEL SUGARMAN

A BOOK owned by Adolf Hitler detailing the Jewish population­s of cities across North America has been put on display for the first time, in the Canadian capital Ottawa.

The book — entitled Statistics, Media, and Organizati­ons of Jewry in the United States and Canada — was a 137-page report commission­ed by the Nazis in 1944 and part of Hitler’s personal library.

It was purchased by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) last year and went on display for the first time last weekend as part of the Commemorat­ion of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Its author, the Nazi linguist Heinz Kloss, compiled an in-depth guide to Jewish communitie­s in the two countries, including sorting Jewish residents by language and country of origin.

The 1944 volume, which contains the bookplate used by Hitler in his personal collection, is believed to have been kept at the Berghof, his summer residence, before being taken by Allied soldiers who occupied the complex after Germany’s defeat.

Michael Kent, a curator at the LAC, told the Guardian that the book “demonstrat­es the Holocaust wasn’t a European Hitler’s bookplate on the report

event — it was an event that didn’t have the opportunit­y to spread out of Europe.

“It reminds us that conflicts and human tragedies that seemed far away could find their way to North America.”

Rebecca Margolis, president of the Canadian Associatio­n for Canadian Jewish Studies, described how “this invaluable report offers a documented confirmati­on of the fears felt so acutely and expressed by so many Canadian Jews during the Second World War: that the Nazis would land on our shores and with them, the annihilati­on of Jewish life here.”

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom