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LA museum displays infamous Hitler letter
A detail of a letter written by Adolf Hitler is photographed, Tuesday, June 7, 2011 in New York.
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LA museum displays infamous Hitler letter
LA museum displays infamous Hitler letter
For the first time, a Southland museum is displaying a letter written by a young Adolph Hitler. The letter is on display starting Tuesday at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
The now infamous note was written by a 19-year-old Hitler who pecked at a typewriter to express his anti-Semitic beliefs in 1919 — not long after the end of WWI. The letter is typed in German and signed by the Nazi leader.
Historians call the document "The Gemlich Letter" because Hitler wrote it to fellow German soldier and propagandist Adolf Gemlich.
Rabbi Marvin Hier runs the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles where the letter is on display. He says Hitler’s words reveal that he imagined his goal to destroy Jewish people long before WWII.
“We’re happy in a sense that such a horrible letter will serve as a calling and a reminder to young people not to allow bigots to win the day," he said.
More than a dozen spectators visited the center to observe the interactive display built around the two-and-a-half page letter. Holocaust survivor Jean Greenstein of Tarzana was among them.
“It just reminds me of things that I knew anyway," said Greenstein. "But the most significant part is that it seems to me that this is the seed where murderous anti-Semitism began."
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An American soldier found the Gemlich letter decades ago near the Southern German city of Nuremberg and brought it back to America before a private collector in California purchased it.
Experts in the U.S. and abroad verified the authenticity of the letter before the Wiesenthal Center raised $150,000 to purchase it.
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