- NEW YORK (AP) -- Heinrich Himmler was just 27 when he studied a copy of
Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
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- The man who would eventually order construction
of the Auschwitz concentration camp evidently liked what he read.
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- 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.
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- "It shows that the doctrine of anti-Semitism,
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.
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- Himmler unerlined 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.
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- "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."
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- Himmler began reading the book, the scond
volume of Hitler's manifesto, in 1927, the same year he was named deputy
leader of the secret police.
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- 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."
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- "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.
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- The historian said scholars had been
unaware of the book's existence.
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- 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.
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- "It'll be displayed," he added.
"It's part of the story of the rise of Nazism."
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