Ek Number Mein

[Cortney Ruic]

Hitlerbegan Mein Kampf while imprisoned following his failed coup in Munich in November 1923 and a trial in February 1924 for high treason, in which he received a sentence of five years. Although he received many visitors initially, he soon devoted himself entirely to the book. As he continued, he realized that it would have to be a two-volume work, with the first volume scheduled for release in early 1925. The governor of Landsberg noted at the time that "he [Hitler] hopes the book will run into many editions, thus enabling him to fulfill his financial obligations and to defray the expenses incurred at the time of his trial."[4][5] After slow initial sales, the book became a bestseller in Germany following Hitler's rise to power in 1933.[6]

After Hitler's death, copyright of Mein Kampf passed to the state government of Bavaria, which refused to allow any copying or printing of the book in Germany. In 2016, following the expiry of the copyright held by the Bavarian state government, Mein Kampf was republished in Germany for the first time since 1945, which prompted public debate and divided reactions from Jewish groups. A team of scholars from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich published a German language two-volume almost 2,000-page edition annotated with about 3,500 notes. This was followed in 2021 by a 1,000-page French edition based on the German annotated version, with about twice as much commentary as text.[7]

Hitler originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).[8] Max Amann, head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler's publisher, is said to have suggested[9] the much shorter "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle").

In Mein Kampf, Hitler used the main thesis of "the Jewish peril", which posits a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership.[10] The narrative describes the process by which he became increasingly antisemitic and militaristic, especially during his years in Vienna. He speaks of not having met a Jew until he arrived in Vienna, and that at first his attitude was liberal and tolerant. When he first encountered the antisemitic press, he says, he dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. Later he accepted the same antisemitic views, which became crucial to his program of national reconstruction of Germany.

Mein Kampf has also been studied as a work on political theory. For example, Hitler announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world's two evils: communism and Judaism. In the book, Hitler blamed Germany's chief woes on the parliament of the Weimar Republic, the Jews, and Social Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish interests.[11] He announced that he wanted to destroy the parliamentary system completely, believing it to be corrupt in principle, as those who reach power are inherent opportunists.

While historians dispute the exact date Hitler decided to exterminate the Jewish people, few place the decision before the mid-1930s.[12] First published in 1925, Mein Kampf shows Hitler's personal grievances and his ambitions for creating a New Order. Hitler also wrote that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated text that purported to expose a Jewish plot to control the world,[13] was an authentic document. This later became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution and annihilation of the Jews.[14][15]

The historian Ian Kershaw observed that several passages in Mein Kampf are undeniably of a genocidal nature.[16] Hitler wrote "the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated",[17] and he suggested that, "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."[18]

The racial laws to which Hitler referred resonate directly with his ideas in Mein Kampf. In the first edition, Hitler stated that the destruction of the weak and sick is far more humane than their protection. Apart from this allusion to humane treatment, Hitler saw a purpose in destroying "the weak" in order to provide the proper space and purity for the "strong".[19]

Hitler described that, when he was in Vienna, it was repugnant for him to see the mixture of races "of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats, and always that infection which dissolves human society, the Jew, were all here and there and everywhere."[20] He also wrote that he viewed the Japanese victory over the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 as a "blow to Austrian Slavism".[21]

In the chapter "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy", Hitler argued that the Germans needed Lebensraum in the East, a "historic destiny" that would properly nurture the German people.[22] Hitler believed that "the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race."[23]

And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.[24]

Hitler wrote that he was against any attempts to Germanise Slavs and criticised the previous attempts at trying to Germanise the Austrian Slavs. He also criticised people in pan-German movements in Germany who thought that forcing ethnic Poles living in Germany to speak the German language would turn them into Germans; he believed that would have caused a "foreign race" by its own "inferiority" to damage the "dignity" and "nobility" of the German nation.[25]

Hitler began to distance himself from the book after becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933. He dismissed it as "fantasies behind bars" that were little more than a series of articles for the Vlkischer Beobachter, and later told Hans Frank that "If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book."[28] Nevertheless, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Germany during the 1930s.[29] During Hitler's years in power, the book was in high demand in libraries and often reviewed and quoted in other publications. It was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front.[26] By 1939, it had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages.[30]

Mein Kampf, in essence, lays out the ideological program Hitler established for the Holocaust, by identifying the Jews and "Bolsheviks" as racially and ideologically inferior and threatening, and "Aryans" and National Socialists as racially superior and politically progressive. Hitler's revolutionary goals included expulsion of the Jews from Greater Germany and the unification of German peoples into one Greater Germany. Hitler desired to restore German lands to their greatest historical extent, real or imagined.

Due to its racist content and the historical effect of Nazism upon Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, it is considered a highly controversial book. Criticism has not come solely from opponents of Nazism. Italian fascist dictator and Nazi ally Benito Mussolini was also critical of the book, saying that it was "a boring tome that I have never been able to read" and remarking that Hitler's beliefs, as expressed in the book, were "little more than commonplace clichs".[31] The American literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke wrote a 1939 rhetorical analysis of the work, The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle", which revealed an underlying message of aggressive intent.[32]

The American journalist John Gunther said in 1940 that compared to autobiographies such as Leon Trotsky's My Life or Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Mein Kampf was "vapid, vain, rhetorical, diffuse, prolix." However, he added that "it is a powerful and moving book, the product of great passionate feeling". He suggested that the book exhausted curious German readers, but its "ceaseless repetition of the argument, left impregnably in their minds, fecund and germinating".[33]

In his 1943 book The Menace of the Herd, Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn[35] described Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf and elsewhere as "a veritable reductio ad absurdum of 'progressive' thought"[36] and betraying "a curious lack of original thought" that shows Hitler offered no innovative or original ideas but was merely "a virtuoso of commonplaces which he may or may not repeat in the guise of a 'new discovery.'"[37] Hitler's stated aim, Kuehnelt-Leddihn writes, is to quash individualism in furtherance of political goals:

In his The Second World War, published in several volumes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Winston Churchill wrote that he felt that after Hitler's ascension to power, no other book than Mein Kampf deserved more intensive scrutiny.[39]

A number of translators have commented on the poor quality of Hitler's use of language in writing Mein Kampf. Olivier Mannoni, who translated the 2021 French critical edition, said about the original German text that it was "An incoherent soup, one could become half-mad translating it," and said that previous translations had corrected the language, giving the false impression that Hitler was a "cultured man" with "coherent and grammatically correct reasoning". He added "To me, making this text elegant is a crime."[7] Mannoni's comments are similar to those made by Ralph Manheim, who did the first English-language translation in 1943. Mannheim wrote in the foreword to the edition "Where Hitler's formulations challenge the reader's credulity I have quoted the German original in the notes." This evaluation of the poor quality of Hitler's prose and his inability to express his opinions coherently was shared by William S. Schlamm, who reviewed Manheim's translation in The New York Times, writing that "there was not the faintest similarity to a thought and barely a trace of language."[41]

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