While The Books He Didn’t Burn has some solid and insightful moments, you are left wanting more from the documentary. Sadly, the film never expands on our previous knowledge of him when there seem to be multiple possibilities for doing so.

Adolf Hitler had a vast library of over 15,000 books in his collection, and some 1,300 have been archived in the United States Library of Congress so historians and academics can scour them to learn more about the dictator. Do Hitler’s books also show us what influences other generations of alt-right and racist groups and people try to achieve?

Oddly, for a film about Hitler’s collection, we spend very little time learning about the books he had in his collection. Instead, the idea of his collection is used as a way to navigate more into the history of the man himself and how what influenced him now influences new generations. When The Books He Didn’t Burn does veer off in this manner, you can’t help but be a little disappointed. What should be an insightful gaze into what influenced the dictator, tries to be much more, to a limiting level of success.

If the film had kept its focus, you would be enthralled, learning more about Renaud Camus and other theorists, etc, and at times, be given a great in-depth look at the learnings of a man who never finished high school. But that decision to go beyond the Nazi regime hurts the film, especially knowing that there is so much information to mine from what Hitler would have been influenced by in his life.

By trying to be this all-encompassing piece on how racism can be entertained and promoted via books even to the present day, The Books He Didn’t Burn loses its way to become a touch unstructured, even with the chapters presented. The constant leaps to the next section without spending more time on an area that was interesting frustrates you as a viewer, as there is barely enough analysis occurring. A documentary like this should not be broad-stroking to get to the next point; it should be settling the viewer down to explain in detail why this book did what it did. Or even why this moment in history was so important. Instead, we move along at a needlessly brisk pace.

While we do not learn many new things about Hitler, was he reading to become more intelligent, more learned to further his ideas, or was he, in fact, looking for as many others who sympathised and to whom he could relate to prove his ideals were on the “right” track? What should be a film with endless fascinating insights falters with The Books He Didn’t Burn, leaving you not as satisfied as you would wish.

★★★

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