Mein Kampf Outlines Nazi Thought

Date July 18, 1925–December 11, 1926

Adolf Hitler, the future Nazi dictator of Germany, published a heavily edited and ponderous political statement that was slow to sell until Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, when sales figures jumped significantly. The racist and militaristic nature of the work provided a chilling window into Nazi thought.

Locale Bavaria, Germany

Key Figures

• Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), dictator of Germany, 1933–1945
• Rudolf Hess (1894–1987), Hitler’s secretary and later deputy
• Max Amman (1891–1957), head of the Nazi Party’s publishing house

Summary of Event

In the so-called Beer Hall Putsch of November, 1923, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to seize power in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. After the movement’s failure, Hitler was tried and found guilty of high treason, and he spent a year in Landsberg Prison. While there, he began writing the first volume of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf (1925–26; English translation, 1939). Hitler used the book, the title of which means “my struggle,” to set down his life story and political views.

During his year of enforced idleness, Hitler dictated a mass of thoughts and reminiscences, much of which was taken down by his close companion Rudolf Hess. After his release from prison, Hitler turned the manuscript over to Max Amman, the Nazi Party’s publisher, who found it in need of major editing. With the help of Hess and a few others, Amman put the work into publishable form. Hitler had wanted to title it Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, but Amman gave it the shorter title of Mein Kampf. From 1924 to 1927, the German government banned Hitler from speaking, and so after the publication of the first volume on July 18, 1925, Hitler quickly set to work on a second volume, which was published on December 11, 1926. Although Hitler believed that world events occur not by writing but by speaking, he seemed to have had little trouble becoming a writer.

Mein Kampf is a mixture of autobiography and political ideology that both reveals and hides a great deal about Hitler. The author described himself as a seeker of truth who spent a pleasant childhood in his native Austria despite his father’s harsh discipline. His mother’s death in 1907 came as a crushing blow, and Hitler moved to Vienna, where he had his first real exposure to Jews and to anti-Semitic doctrine. Life in Vienna intensified his dislike for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hitler came to believe that Germany was the only true home of German culture. In 1912, Hitler moved to Munich, a city he found truly German, and in 1914 the coming of World War I allowed him to experience the life of a soldier. For Hitler, military service was a crowning educational achievement and the inspiration for his career as a speaker. Recalling the heroic deeds of the German army, Hitler blamed the Jews and Marxists for the country’s collapse at war’s end, the establishment of a weak democratic government, and the punitive treatment of Germany by its enemies. He promised readers that Germany would rearm and assume its rightful role as a world power.

Race dominates the ideology on display in Mein Kampf. Hitler was convinced that every race should preserve its purity or face decline, and he was especially distraught that the Aryan race (whose nature he never precisely defined), especially German Aryans, seemed to have failed in this effort. He believed that if the German race could be kept pure—that is, if its most Aryan elements could be increased through careful breeding—Germany could achieve world domination. The greatest threat to Germany in Hitler’s eyes were the Jews, whom he compared to parasites, and he promised that the score against the Jews would soon be settled. To Hitler, the state was the means to a more important end: racial self-preservation. He saw Germany’s mission as one that would secure the land required by future Aryan populations, which Hitler believed would number 250 million in a hundred years. The only alternative plan, as Hitler saw it, was to secure “living space” (Lebensraum) for Germans in Russia.

Hitler saw himself as Germany’s political savior and the Nazi Party as the source of the force necessary to prevail in a racial and political struggle against Jews and Marxists. One man, he insisted, had to step forward to lead, and he clearly saw himself in that role: Mein Kampf referred to the “strong man” who is “mightiest alone” and whose ideas are so revolutionary that they may not be accepted in his lifetime. Hitler was known to be a great admirer of Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator who had ruled Italy since 1919, but he mentioned Mussolini by name only once in Mein Kampf, leaving the implication that he wanted to avoid sharing history’s heroic role.

Given that Hitler had served as propaganda chief of the Nazi Party, it is not surprising that Mein Kampf offered a lengthy commentary on propaganda. In an early chapter on war propaganda, Hitler wrote scornfully of Germany’s weak and ineffective efforts during World War I. In Hitler’s view, war propaganda was a means to German victory, and to accomplish this the government needed to appeal to the psychology of the masses. In Hitler’s view, British and American propaganda succeeded, especially in their portrayals of Germans as barbarians and in their observation of the principle that propaganda must be simple and repetitious.

Hitler also stressed the superiority of oratory to the written word. He took pride in his own prowess as a speaker and asserted that speaking was the most effective way to capitalize on the emotions (rather than the intellect), which would propel audience members to action. In a later chapter, Hitler described the distinct roles played by propaganda and organization, saying that propaganda was best used as a tool to recruit a movement’s core members and that organization was needed to ensure that only the most valuable followers were made members.

The publication of Mein Kampf yielded Hitler a steady income, one that was initially modest but tripled after the Nazis made gains in the 1930 elections. The book’s royalties became truly significant after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and it also sold well in Italy, where Mussolini took a personal interest in having it published. By 1945, sales had reached ten million in Germany alone, and the book had been translated into sixteen foreign languages. After World War II, its sale was banned in Germany, but it continued to sell in many parts of the world. In the Middle East, a former Nazi functionary translated it into Arabic, and in Latin America an Argentine publisher put out German and Spanish editions. Many of Hitler’s imitators have attributed their conversion to Nazism to reading Mein Kampf, including George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.

At the end of World War II, following the Allied victory, the German state of Bavaria obtained the rights to the book and it was determined that the copyright would not expire until seventy years after Hitler's death. In December 2015, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich announced that it would be publishing the first new edition of Mein Kampf since that time in Germany. The new edition, which will be an approximately two-thousand page, two-volume version with heavy academic annotations, was planned to publish in early 2016. Reactions to this news, especially within the Jewish community, were mixed. While some scholars argued that the new version's inclusion of historical analysis could provide educational benefit, others remained concerned that the publication would prompt another generation of audiences to connect with Hitler's words.

Significance

Nazism without Mein Kampf would be like Marxism without Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto, 1850). Beyond offering Hitler’s version of the events that preceded his rise to power, the book provided an outline of the Nazi Party’s goals, and it became obligatory reading material for many Germans. It also sounded a warning to the world that went largely unheeded. Historical events such as the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Germans are clearly predicted in its pages, and even the Nazi slaughter of millions is not surprising given the unbridled hatred that Hitler expressed toward Jews and others whom he considered unworthy. The most lasting legacy of Mein Kampf, however, is that it preserved Hitler’s ideas beyond his own lifetime.

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