Can Books Provide an Agenda for Mass Murder?’

That is a key question posed by Jascha Hannover‘s “The Books He Didn’t Burn,” a documentary to be featured in its U.S. premiere at the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 15 at Lincoln Center in New York. Its relevance to the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and rightwing Christian nationalists is stunning.

Hannover’s movie takes a critical look at the history of Western thought by examining the remains of Adolf Hitler’s private library. The dictator and mass murderer owned 16,000 books at the end of his life, 1,200 of which are kept in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C today. The movie follows American historian Timothy Ryback, who studied these books for almost a decade. Hitler’s private library shows that he sprang from a long line of racist and anti-semitic thinkers and writers, many of them representing the intellectual mainstream of their time. The hateful ideas in them paved the way for Hitler – and influence far-right extremists until this day.