Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published in two volumes, the first in July 1925 and the second in December 1926, by the Munich publisher Franz Eher Verlag, the official publishing house of the Nazi Party. The first volume was dictated by Hitler in Landsberg Prison in 1924, where he was serving a sentence for the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. The book is one of the most consequential political documents of the twentieth century, not for its literary merit, which is negligible, but for the precision with which it stated, more than fifteen years before the killing began, the ideology that would drive the Holocaust. It was read by millions, dismissed by many of those who read it as rhetorical excess, and acted on with terrible literalness when its author had the power to do so.
What the book actually says
The two volumes run to roughly 700 pages in most editions and are organised around several intertwined themes: Hitler’s autobiography, his political development, the supposed crimes of the Weimar Republic, and his racial worldview. It is the racial argument that gives the book its lasting significance.
Hitler argues that history is the record of struggle between racially distinct human groups for living space and dominance. The Aryan race, which he identifies primarily with northern Europeans, is the creator of all human civilisation. The Jewish race is presented not as a religious community but as a biologically distinct group whose existence is parasitic on the cultures it inhabits. The book describes Jews as “the maggot in a rotting body” (Volume I, Chapter 11), as “spiritual pestilence”, and as “the personification of the devil and the symbol of all evil”. The metaphors are biological, hygienic, and demonological in roughly equal measure.
The argument moves from these characterisations to a programme. The German nation requires Lebensraum, living space, in eastern Europe, to be obtained at the expense of the Slavic peoples currently occupying it. The Jewish question must be solved because the Jewish presence in Europe makes the Aryan race’s regeneration impossible. In a passage at the end of Volume II, Chapter 15, Hitler writes that if “twelve or fifteen thousand Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas” at the start of the First World War, the war would not have been lost. The passage is not a casual rhetorical flourish; the connection between gas, Jews, and the German wartime situation is made explicit by Hitler himself in 1925.
How widely it was read
The first volume sold modestly until the Nazi Party became a mass movement in the early 1930s. Sales then climbed sharply. From 1933 onwards the book was promoted by the regime, distributed to libraries and schools, and given to every newly married couple in Germany as a gift from the state. By 1945 approximately 12 million copies had been sold or distributed in Germany alone. Translations were published in most European languages, and abridged editions appeared in English, French, Italian, and Spanish during the 1930s. The English-language abridgement published by Hurst and Blackett in London in 1933 carried a preface noting that the publishers did not endorse the views in the text, an unusual disclaimer that makes clear what the views actually were.
The book was, in other words, not hidden. It was the most widely distributed political work in Germany after the Bible, and was available in translation across Europe and in the United States.
How it was received by those who could have acted
The reception of Mein Kampf by foreign diplomats, journalists, and politicians who met Hitler or read the book during the 1930s is one of the most studied failures of political imagination in modern history. The pattern was consistent: the more extreme passages were treated as electoral rhetoric that would be moderated once Hitler held power, the antisemitism was treated as a personal eccentricity rather than a programme, and the explicit threats against Jews and against eastern Europe were treated as posturing for domestic consumption.
The British ambassador to Berlin from 1937 to 1939, Sir Nevile Henderson, recorded in his memoir Failure of a Mission (1940) that he had read the book and considered Hitler’s racial views “extreme but containable”. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Hitler in 1931, dismissed him in the resulting book as “a man of startling insignificance” who would be unable to put any of the book’s programme into action. Lord Halifax, visiting Berlin in November 1937 as Lord President of the Council, recorded in his diary that Hitler had been “reasonable” on most matters and that the racial passages in the book reflected “older obsessions” that no longer drove policy. All three judgements were proved catastrophically wrong within five years.
A smaller number of readers took the book at face value. Winston Churchill, in his 1937 essay collection Great Contemporaries, wrote that Mein Kampf was “the new Koran of faith and war” and that its author’s intentions, while perhaps not yet fixed, were “not such as anyone could ignore”. The Jewish journalist Konrad Heiden, whose 1936 biography Hitler: A Biography was banned in Germany on publication, treated the book as a literal programme and was substantially correct in his predictions about what would happen if Hitler were not stopped. Heiden’s reading was the exception.
What the failure of imagination consisted of
The category mistake made by most foreign observers was to assume that a modern industrialised state with a long civilisational tradition was incapable of acting on the ideology its leader had set out in writing. The assumption was that the institutions of German government, the army, the civil service, the universities, the churches, would constrain a fanatic in power and force the moderation that ordinary politics requires. The assumption was wrong. The institutions were captured, co-opted, or replaced. The ideology was implemented.
The lesson that historians of the Nazi regime have drawn from Mein Kampf is not that the book predicted the Holocaust in every detail. It did not: the specific machinery of mass murder was developed during 1941 and 1942, and key decisions were made in response to the military and logistical situation as it evolved. The lesson is that the ideological grounds for the Holocaust were stated openly fifteen years before the killing began, by the man who would order it, in a book that millions of people read. The Holocaust was not an aberration concealed from the world. It was the implementation of a programme that had been published, distributed, translated, and read.
See also
Sources
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, two volumes, Franz Eher Verlag, Munich, 1925 and 1926
- Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger and Roman Töppel (eds), Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 2016
- Mein Kampf, English-language abridgement, Hurst and Blackett, London, 1933
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, unabridged English translation by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1943
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889 to 1936: Hubris, Allen Lane, 1998, particularly Chapter 7 on the Landsberg dictation
- Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, Victor Gollancz, 1936
- Winston Churchill, “Hitler and his Choice”, in Great Contemporaries, Thornton Butterworth, 1937
- Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission, Putnam, 1940
- Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf” 1922 to 1945, Oldenbourg, 2006
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia entry on Mein Kampf