Partners in Crime

by

Laine Farley

From the “truth is stranger than fiction” file come several tales of bookmarks associated with criminal figures. When the National Archives in London recently released thousands of documents on the infamous Moors Murderers, a bookmark told a story of the relationship between murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady during their lives in prison. They were convicted of the grisly murders of five children between 1963 and 1965, four of whom were buried in Saddleworth Moor. Hindley had been infatuated with Brady and altered her beliefs and appearance to please him. She later claimed she had acted under his influence, taking part in the crimes out of fear of retaliation against her and her family. Brady held that she had been a full participant in planning and executing the horrible murders and was lying about her reformation and conversion to Catholicism. The recently released papers revealed they corresponded with each other through their respective prison guards. According to an article in the London Times, she sent him a bookmark as a Christmas present in 1971. A return letter in 1972 stated that “Brady asked that (the bookmark) be returned to Myra.  It’s obviously a symbolic gesture meaning the relationship is at an end.” 

Another even more notorious pair was connected by a bookmark. In September 2002, Reuters reported that a gold bookmark given to Adolf Hitler by Eva Braun would be sold by a Madrid auction house with bids starting at 5,000 euros (about $4,900 at the time). Allegedly, she gave him the bookmark to cheer him up after the Russian defeat of the Nazis in the battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in the war in 1943. The bookmark was about seven inches long with a portrait of Hitler, a four-leaf clover, an imperial eagle and a swastika. It was engraved with a message translated as follows: “My Adolf, don’t worry . . . (the defeat) . . . was only an inconvenience that will not break your certainty of victory. My love for you will be eternal, just as our Reich will be eternal. Always yours, Eva 3-2-43”.

Although the auctioneer Santiago Duran would say only that the owner was from abroad, another source claimed it came from a relative of Wilhelm Keitel, former Commander-in-Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, who was executed as a war criminal in 1946. 

Remarkably, just before the sale was scheduled in October, three men stole it from the auction house along with several pieces of jewelry. The thieves were from one of the former Soviet Republics but just grabbed what they could and were not targeting the bookmark. All of the stolen items were recovered except for the bookmark and a necklace. The owner of an antique store in Madrid that specializes in World War II claimed that the bookmark could not be authenticated even though the auction house, Duran Subastas, claimed it was genuine and belonged to a Brazilian. 

While searching for any further mention of the mysterious bookmark, I came across a fascinating article on “Hitler’s Forgotten Library” by Timothy W. Ryback in the Atlantic Monthly. As the introduction notes, “You can tell a lot about a person from what he reads. The surviving—and largely ignored—remnants of Adolf Hitler's personal library reveal a deep but erratic interest in religion and theology.” Although Eva’s purported gift seems odd as a reminder of an event he must have wanted to forget, perhaps it was appropriate for a man who accumulated thousands of volumes, estimated as high as 16,000 by some. Ryback’s research into the remaining parts of Hitler’s collection dispersed between the Library of Congress and Brown University reveals a fascinating and complex portrait of how he collected such a large library (much of it through gifts), evidence of which books he read and those he ignored, and his habits of annotating passages of interest.

Ryback finds evidence of Hitler the protégé of Germany's financial, social, and cultural elite in books with presentation inscriptions by various industrialists and others with social prominence, and Hitler the future mass murderer in a treatise on chemical warfare. In a guide to the cultural monuments of Brussels, he notes that the “chapter on Frederick the Great is especially worn, its pages tattered, marked with fingerprints, and smeared with red candle wax. Tucked in the crease between pages 162 and 163 I found a three-quarter-inch strand of stiff black hair,” an eerily personal sort of bookmark.

But Ryback is most surprised by Hitler’s apparent interest in spirituality demonstrated by “130 books on religious and spiritual subjects, ranging from Occidental occultism to Eastern mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ.” He observes that “Hitler was the classic apostate. He rebelled against the established theology in which he was born and bred, all the while seeking to fill the resulting spiritual void.”

Although many of the books on spirituality were given as gifts, they also contained evidence of having been read and studied including a well-worn copy of Worte Christi, or Words of Christ. Ryback found a “white-silk bookmark, preserved in its original perfection between pages 22 and 23 (only the portion exposed to the air had deteriorated), [that] lay across a description of the Last Supper as related by Saint John.” Other books revealed a consistent pattern of annotations and marginalia but no other bookmarks, so perhaps this one bookmark and the book it accompanied were favorites of Hitler’s sister Paula who was a devout Catholic. Yet Ryback found ample evidence that Hitler studied a wide range of books on spirituality and his theory on how they influenced Hitler is worth a careful read. 

As I read again the articles about Hindley and Brady, I was struck by the fact that Brady’s favorite book was Mein Kampf and that Hindley dyed her hair blond, wore Germanic clothes, and renounced her faith to please him. As noted by Hannah Fletcher, author of a Times article titled “Return of bookmark ended a notorious relationship,” the rejected bookmark was “a simple conclusion to a complex, destructive and terrifying partnership.” The contents of the bookmark may be lost to history and the Hitler/Braun bookmark may never be recovered or verified, yet they both mark events that we would prefer to forget.

Bookmark specifications: None, fortunately


Laine Farley is a digital librarian who misses being around the look, feel and smell of real books.  Her collection of over 3,000 bookmarks began with a serendipitous find while reviewing books donated to the library. Fortunately, her complementary collection of articles and books about bookmarks provides an excuse for her to get back to libraries and try her hand at writing about bookmarks. Farley’s web site is Collecting Bookmarks (Physical, not Virtual). Contact Laine.