The publication of Mein Kampf

On 18 July 1925 the Nazi Party’s Munich publishing house, Franz Eher Nachfolger, brought out the first volume of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). It ran to more than four hundred pages, bore the subtitle Eine Abrechnung (“A Reckoning”) and cost twelve marks, a good deal for the time. Hitler had written it the year before in prison at Landsberg, where he was serving his sentence for the Beer Hall Putsch. The second volume, The National Socialist Movement, appeared on 11 December 1926. The book combined a polished autobiography with an exposition of a world view in which history is a struggle of races, the Jews are the mortal enemy of the Germans and the nation’s future depends on conquering “living space” in eastern Europe. For several years it sold poorly, and few people took it seriously. After 1933 it became the most widely distributed book in Germany, and in 1939 Hitler began to carry out the programme it set down.

A book from a cell

The Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923 ended in defeat, but the trial before the Munich People’s Court in the spring of 1924 gave Hitler a platform from which he addressed the whole of Germany. On 1 April 1924 he was sentenced to five years’ fortress confinement, with the possibility of release after a few months. In the fortress at Landsberg am Lech he had a comfortable room overlooking the river, received visitors and was sent so many letters and parcels that the prison resembled his headquarters. He had no influence, however, over what was happening to a movement split into warring factions, and he decided to use the time to write. Debts and lawyers’ fees also spurred him to work.

According to a long-repeated version, Hitler dictated the book to fellow prisoners: the watchmaker Emil Maurice, a member of his former bodyguard, and the student Rudolf Hess, who had given himself up to the police in May 1924 and been sent to Landsberg. More recent research, described among others by Eberhard Jäckel and Ellen Latzin in the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, shows that Hitler wrote it himself, probably from July 1924, on a portable typewriter given to him by one of his wealthy patronesses. Hess listened to his disquisitions, read the manuscript, corrected it and made fair copies. He had little influence on the content, although it was he who brought to Hitler his teacher, the geopolitician Karl Haushofer, who visited him in prison and promoted the concept of living space coined by Friedrich Ratzel. The book was to have been called Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. The shorter, catchier title is said to have been suggested by the party’s publisher, Max Amann, though this story too is uncertain.

On 20 December 1924 Hitler was released. On 27 February 1925 he re-founded the party, and in March the Bavarian authorities banned him from speaking in public. The ban, which remained in force in Bavaria until 1927 and in Prussia until 1928, made the printed word more important to him than ever. He wrote the second volume in 1925–1926, largely in a mountain cottage on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, where he later built his residence.

What is in Mein Kampf

The first volume opens with a dedication to the sixteen Nazis killed in the putsch and ends with an account of the birth of the NSDAP. It tells of Hitler’s youth in Austria, his years in Vienna, the war and his path into politics, but this autobiography is stylised and in many places untrue. Hitler presents himself as the son of a poor family who through suffering in Vienna arrived at the truth about the world, a front-line soldier betrayed by the revolution and finally the humble “seventh member” who built the party from nothing. He describes his part in the meeting at the Sterneckerbräu and his first months in the party in such a way that no one else could take the credit from him. At the same time he settles accounts with the supposed traitors of November 1923, above all the Bavarian politicians who let him down at that time.

The book’s first page proclaims that German Austria must return to the great German motherland, because “common blood belongs in a common Reich”. This demand, contrary to the Treaty of Saint-Germain, was also the first point of the party programme of 1920. At the heart of the whole argument, however, is racism. According to Hitler, mankind is divided into races of differing worth, and the only creative race is the “Aryans”, whose greatest enemy is the Jews. Hitler portrays them as “parasites” and “poison” in the body of nations and blames them for everything he considers evil: stock-exchange capitalism and Marxism, parliamentary democracy, the press, modern art, prostitution and venereal disease. He accepts as genuine the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and calls Bolshevism an attempt by the Jews to win world domination. In the second volume he wrote that if, at the beginning of the war and during it, twelve or fifteen thousand “Hebrew corrupters of the people” had been held under poison gas, the sacrifice of millions of soldiers at the front would not have been in vain. Historians agree that the book contains no plan for the Holocaust, which took shape during the war, but such sentences show how far his imagination already reached in the 1920s. The British historian Ian Kershaw pointed out that several passages of Mein Kampf are unmistakably genocidal in character.

The second volume sets out a programme. The state is to serve the preservation of “racial purity” and is to be ruled not by parliament but by a leader answerable only to the nation. Propaganda must be simple, emotional and must endlessly repeat a few slogans. The most important chapters for the coming war are those on foreign policy. Hitler held that the frontiers of 1914 were not a sufficient goal and that Germany could not feed itself from its own soil. He rejected the pre-war pursuit of colonies and world trade, which in his view had driven the Reich into war with Britain. He wrote that the National Socialists were consciously drawing a line under the foreign policy of the pre-war period, taking up where things had been left off six centuries before, halting the Germans’ eternal march to the south and west of Europe and turning their gaze to the lands in the east. And further: “But if we speak of new land in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.” Russia, ruled by the Bolsheviks – that is, in his view, by the Jews – was supposedly doomed to collapse, and Germany was to win living space on its territory by the sword.

For this to be possible, Germany had to avoid a war on two fronts. Hitler therefore wrote of an alliance with Britain and with the Fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini, for whose sake he was prepared to give up German-speaking South Tyrol (PL) – which scandalised many nationalists. He called France the “inexorable mortal enemy” of the German people, with which there had to be a reckoning before the march east. He also sharply criticised the Weimar Republic’s policy towards Soviet Russia, which had been co-operating with Moscow since the Treaty of Rapallo. He devoted little space to Poland. He listed it among the states that had taken land from Germany, and regarded the pre-war policy of Germanising the Poles in Prussia as a mistake, because in his opinion only land, not people, could be Germanised. That sentence contained the germ of the policy which after 1939 led to the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the territories annexed to the Reich so that Germans could be settled there.

A delayed bestseller

The first volume was printed in an edition of ten thousand copies. According to the publisher’s figures, cited by Kershaw, about 9,500 copies were sold in 1925; sales then declined, and in 1928 amounted to only about three thousand. There were few reviews. In nationalist circles the book provoked disputes, as the followers of Erich Ludendorff – with whom Hitler had fallen out after the general’s defeat in the presidential election of the spring of 1925 – criticised it sharply. The democratic press saw it rather as proof that Hitler was a spent politician and a scribbler. In 1928 Hitler himself dictated another book, devoted to foreign policy, but the publisher advised against publishing it, judging that it would hurt sales of the first. The manuscript, known as Hitler’s “second book”, was found only after the war.

The Great Depression changed everything. In 1930, when the NSDAP became the second-largest party in the Reichstag, the two volumes were combined into a cheaper single-volume “people’s edition” at eight marks. According to the Austrian historian Othmar Plöckinger, about 240,000 copies had been sold before January 1933. In 1933 alone, after Hitler came to power, more than a million were sold. From 1936 many register offices presented it to newly-weds instead of a Bible, and during the war soldiers received it in a special knapsack edition. The official print run up to 1945 exceeded twelve million copies, though some researchers believe the figure was inflated for propaganda purposes. The book made Hitler a fortune, and once he came to power the back taxes owed on his income from it were written off.

It was long repeated that everyone in Germany owned Mein Kampf but no one read it. Plöckinger showed that this is a simplification, widespread after the war not least as a convenient excuse. The book was quoted in the press and in schools, borrowed from libraries and widely discussed. Abroad it was read above all as a warning. Official translations often toned down its content: the authorised French translation of 1938 omitted the attacks on France. Winston Churchill wrote after the war that no book deserved more careful study by Allied statesmen and soldiers, and called it the new Koran of faith and war, “turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message”.

The long shadow of Mein Kampf

Fourteen years passed between the publication of the first volume and the invasion of Poland. Hitler, by then chancellor, spoke of his book dismissively as “fantasies behind bars” and assured foreign interlocutors that Germany wanted peace. Scholars debate how far Mein Kampf was a plan and how far a collection of obsessions that Hitler adapted to circumstances. Its main ideas, however, coincide strikingly with what he did. He annexed Austria in 1938. He sought an understanding with Britain and concluded an alliance with Mussolini. He defeated France in 1940, and in June 1941 he attacked the Soviet Union in a war that from the outset was meant to be a war for living space and a racial war of annihilation. In this light, the pact with Moscow of August 1939 was merely a tactical departure from the Landsberg programme. The antisemitism that in Mein Kampf was still a language of hatred and a fantasy of “removing” the Jews became, during the war, a programme for their extermination.

After the war the copyright in the book passed to the Free State of Bavaria, which for seventy years refused to allow it to be republished in Germany. When the copyright expired in 2016, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich published it in two volumes with several thousand footnotes correcting its lies and explaining the sources of Hitler’s ideas. A Polish critical edition was prepared by the historian Eugeniusz Cezary Król (PL). Today Mein Kampf remains above all a document: a record of what Hitler announced openly long before he was able to do it, and which most of his contemporaries did not take seriously.