Library and Archives Canada announced that it had obtained a rare book from 1944 that Adolf Hitler once possessed.
The federal institution mentioned that it got the book through a well-respected Judaica seller, who received it from a collection belonging to a Holocaust survivor.
“Statistics, Media and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada” is a 137-page document written in German and constructed by Heinz Kloss, a prominent German linguist who was in touch with American Nazi sympathizers.
The report cites population statistics in certain cities, in addition to media outlets and organizations crucial then to North American Jewry, according to a Library and Archives Canada statement.
“This work hints at the story of what might have happened in Canada had the Allies lost World War II,” it said. “It also demonstrates that the Holocaust was not a purely European event, but rather an operation that was stopped before it reached North America.”
Rebecca Margolis, president of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, told the BBC: “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.”
Library and Archives Canada said the book was likely taken to the United States as a war artifact as in the spring of 1945. American troops obtained thousands of works from Hitler’s second home near Berchtesgaden in the German Alps.
Hitler is believed to have owned a huge library containing between 6,000 and 16,000 books.
