It is a myth that Hitler often dictated passages until the small hours of the morning to Hess, who, serving as his secretary, typed them up. Many of Hitler’s biographers have simply passed on this legend from the memoirs of prison guard Otto Lurker.63 In reality, Hitler typed the manuscript himself, using the “hunt-and-peck” system, after he had outlined his thoughts by hand on sheets of paper.64 In a letter from late July, Hess described his role in the composition of Mein Kampf. “Hitler regularly reads to me from his book,” Hess wrote. “Whenever a chapter is done, he takes it to me. He explains it to me and we discuss the odd point.”65 By early August, Hitler hoped he would be finished writing in a few days and he solemnly invited Hess to proofread the final draft with him.66 But that never seems to have happened. Hitler kept postponing finishing the manuscript. In late August, he was still working on it constantly and did not wish to be disturbed.67 In September, prison director Otto Leybold witnessed him working on the draft “for several hours each day.”68 By the time he was released from Landsberg on 20 December 1924, large sections of the manuscript were finished. Emil Maurice claimed that he hid them in the wooden body of his gramophone and smuggled them out.69
The appearance of the book was delayed for months. That was partly due to the financial difficulties in which Eher Verlag found itself. “Debts, debts, debts everywhere,” publisher Max Amann complained to Hanfstaengl.70 But politics also played an important role: Hitler did not want the publication of the book to damage his efforts to get the ban on the NSDAP lifted and to found the party anew.71 This was the context in which not only the title was changed—it was advertised as of February 1925 as Mein Kampf (My Struggle)—but the overall structure as well. What had been conceived as one volume was now to appear in two. The first volume ended with the announcement of the Nazi Party manifesto on 24 February 1920, while several programmatic chapters were reserved for volume two.72 In April 1925, Hitler made the final changes to volume one on the Obersalzberg. Josef Stolzing-Cerny, the Völkischer Beobachter’s music critic, and Hess’s fiancée Ilse Pröhl helped with the editing.73
The first volume of Mein Kampf appeared on 18 July 1925, but it would be a while before the second volume was published. It was not until the autumn of 1926 that Hitler once again withdrew to the Obersalzberg to dictate the final parts to one of his secretaries.74 Hess, who had in the meantime become Hitler’s private secretary, did the final editing.75 On 11 December of that year, the second volume appeared in the bookshops. Hess had prophesied that it would unleash a “wave of astonishment, anger and admiration…throughout the German lands,” but sales were initially sluggish, which may have been because of the relatively expensive price tag of 12 marks per volume.76 By the end of 1925, the 10,000-strong first edition of the first volume was sold out, but demand for the second volume was nowhere near as great.77 It was not until the Nazis’ electoral triumphs in 1930 that sales picked up again—in particular the cheaper popular one-volume edition proved to be a big hit. Almost 228,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1932, and after Hitler came to power in 1933, that figure naturally shot up. About 4,000 copies were being sold every day, Hitler told Hess in April 1933: “Good old Amann can’t fund enough printing works to keep up with the demand.” Public libraries and schools were required to buy copies, and starting in 1936, state employees performing civil marriage ceremonies were instructed to give newly-weds a copy of Mein Kampf. During the Second World War, there was a lightweight-paper edition for soldiers. By 1944, almost twelve and a half million copies had been printed.78
If he had suspected he would one day become Reich chancellor, he would never have written Mein Kampf, Hitler once remarked to Hans Frank.79 That was sheer sophistry. Hitler was visibly proud of his book and often gave away signed copies of it as gifts.80 Not only did Mein Kampf make him a rich man, it also played a significant role in his political career. The book served two purposes. On the one hand, by connecting his biography and his political programme, Hitler could portray his life up until his entry into politics as a prelude to his historic mission. His early years of deprivation and disappointment emerged as an essential stage of his development, as the incubation period of a political genius who had been hardened by real life. On the other hand, the book underscored his claim to party leadership in an intellectual sense. It was proof that Hitler was both a politician and a theorist, a combination that, as he crowed in Mein Kampf, tended to occur only very rarely in human history.81 That was one reason for the book’s utterly pretentious style. Hitler was keen to show that, despite his incomplete formal education, he was just as well read and knowledgeable as any university professor.82
Prison guards Lurker and Hemmrich recalled that Hitler built up an extensive library in Landsberg, which took up “a large part of his room with its nice-looking pictures and flowers.”83 But it is hard to determine what he read and what might have served as sources for Mein Kampf. He hardly ever discussed his reading habits and was loath to acknowledge who he took ideas from by name. Otto Strasser, the brother of Gregor, thought he could identify the anti-Semitic notions of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde.84 Other sources that left their mark on Mein Kampf were Arthur de Gobineau’s teachings on the inequality of human races; Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Ethnology of the German People, which was in its third edition by 1923 and which publisher J. F. Lehmann had given Hitler with a personal dedication; and the racist pamphlet by American carmaker Henry Ford, “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” which had appeared in German translation in 1922 and became a huge hit. “I regard Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler allegedly told an American reporter.85 For the second volume, Hitler apparently used American eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which had been published in German in 1925, also by Lehmann, and which argued that racial mixing was the cause of the demise of peoples and cultures.86 This book did not give Hitler any new ideas, but it did reinforce his already strong convictions. That seems to have been typical of Hitler’s reading habits in Landsberg: he did not read in order to test but rather in order to confirm his opinions. Hitler was constantly in search of mosaic stones that could be added to his already existing world view.87
As a result, Mein Kampf contained little that was original. On the contrary, the two-volume work essentially summarised the things Hitler had said in countless speeches before November 1923, although it did maintain the pretence of systematising the highlights of Hitler’s reading and presenting them as a consistent, coherent world view.88 At the core of Hitler’s interpretation of history were the categories “people and race”—the title of Chapter 11 of the first volume of Mein Kampf. Hitler saw the “racial question” as the “key not only to world history but to human culture itself.”89 That distinguished his understanding of history from Marxist thought: for Hitler, races and not classes were the motors of events. Consequently, racial and not class warfare determined the course of historical development. Hitler saw his racial theory as being based on the laws of nature and particularly a supposed natural tendency towards racial purity. “The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose and the tiger a tiger,” Hitler argued. For him, any mixing of races was a violation of the “iron logic of nature” that would automatically lead to decadence and decay. “The reason all the great cultures of the past collapsed,” Hitler proposed, “was that the original creative race died of blood poisoning.”90
Hitler combined his biological racial theory with the social Darwinist ideas he had internalised as a soldier. Nature’s only wish was “the victory of the strong and the destruction or unconditional subordination of the weak.” There was no room for humanitarian considerations in the pitiless “fight for survival” between peoples: “Whoever wants to live must fight, and whoever does not want to fight in this world of eternal tests of strength does not deserve to live.” Within this profoundly inhumane logic, the ultimate goal was the “breeding towards perfection” of the races until the point, somewhere in the distant future, wh
en “the best form of humanity is in charge, having taken possession of the earth.”91 Aryans, who were deemed the sole “creative race,” were the ones to carry out this task. On that score, Hitler was absolutely clear: “Everything we see today of human culture and artistic, scientific and technological achievements is almost exclusively the creative work of the Aryan.”92
In Hitler’s Manichaean world view, the “Jewish race” was the negative mirror image of the Aryan one. Many passages in Mein Kampf are word-for-word repetitions of anti-Semitic tirades like his “Why we are anti-Semites” speech from August 1920. “The Jew” was scapegoated into the incarnation of everything evil, and the fight against him was correspondingly the most important part of Hitler’s political mission. Compared to his earlier statements, however, Mein Kampf did radicalise the measures to be taken to combat this threat. In late July, when asked by one of his visitors at Landsberg whether his attitude towards Jews had changed, Hitler replied: “Yes indeed…I’ve realised that I was far too mild! In the course of working on my book, I’ve come to see that in future we will have to employ the most severe means if we are to triumph. I’m convinced that this is a question of survival not just for our people, but for all peoples. The Jew is a global plague.”93
Hitler was convinced he was acting in the interests not just of the German people but of all the world’s peoples in striving for the “elimination of the Jews.” His obsession was so all-consuming that the anti-Jewish struggle took on apocalyptic dimensions. “If the Jew triumphs over the peoples of the world with his Marxist faith,” Hitler warned, “the crowning moment will be humanity’s danse macabre, for the planet will fly through the ether unpopulated as it did millions of years ago.” That doomsday scenario yielded the following conclusion: “Thus I believe that I am acting according to the will of the Almighty Creator. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of Our Lord.”94 Saul Friedländer has characterised this sort of vulgar, extreme, quasi-religious hostility towards Jews as “redemptive anti-Semitism” and traces its origins back to the Wagner circle and, in particular, the influence of Chamberlain.95
Hitler no longer spoke of deporting or driving out Jews: he now used words like “destruction” and “eradication.” He also availed himself on numerous occasions in Mein Kampf of the language of parasitology, by describing Jews as vermin that needed to be exterminated.96 His anti-Semitic paranoia now included murderous fantasies, as revealed by a passage near the end of the second volume of Mein Kampf: “If at the beginning and over the course of the [First World] war we had subjected twelve to fifteen thousand of these Hebraic corrupters of the people to the same poison gas that hundreds of thousands of our best productive Germans had to endure in the field, then the sacrifice of millions of lives at the front would not have been in vain.”97
Hitler’s foreign-policy views were also radicalised in Mein Kampf. Originally Hitler had entered politics demanding an abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a settling of accounts with Germany’s “arch-enemy” France, the restitution of German colonies and the restoration of Germany’s 1914 borders. These were the sorts of revisionist views prevalent throughout pan-Germanic, ethnic-chauvinist and nationalist circles. In Mein Kampf, Hitler now shifted his emphasis to the idea that a nation with an expanding population like Germany needed territory large enough to feed its people and continue to increase its political power. The notion that Germany needed “living space” can be traced back to the geopolitical ideas of Professor Karl Haushofer. These had considerable influence on the foreign policy of Hitler, who likely learned about them from Haushofer’s student Hess.98 In Landsberg, Hitler also read the 1897 book Political Geography by the geopolitical scientist and co-founder of the Pan-Germanic League Friedrich Ratzel, which Haushofer had brought for Hess.99
How was “living space” to be conquered? In Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf ’s first volume, which criticised pre-1914 German foreign policy, Hitler wrote: “If one wants territory in Europe, it can more or less only happen to the detriment of Russia. The new Reich would have to march in the footsteps of the Teutonic Knights and conquer with the German sword the soil that the German plough would till in order to provide our people with their daily bread.”100 Hitler’s turn of phrase left no doubt that he believed any eastward expansion would require military action. Hitler was even more explicit in Chapter 14 of Mein Kampf ’s second volume, entitled “Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy,” in which he proclaimed the German people’s right “to an appropriate territory on this earth” as one of his central foreign-policy goals. “We will stop the eternal movement of the Germanic tribes to the south and west of Europe,” Hitler wrote, “and train our sights on land to the east. We will finally wind down the colonial and trade policies of the pre-war period and go over to a land policy for the future.”101
Hitler envisioned such a war for living space as a relatively risk-free endeavour. He saw the Soviet Union as being in the hands of “Jewish Bolsheviks,” which in his logic meant that Russia’s racial foundation had been decisively weakened. “The gigantic empire to the east is ripe for collapse,” Hitler wrote. “And the end of Jewish domination in Russia will spell the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by destiny to bear witness to a catastrophe that will provide the most powerful confirmation of the accuracy of ethnic-popular racial theory.”102 This passage sets out and combines Hitler’s two most important goals: the destruction of “Jewish Bolshevism” and the conquest of “living space in the east.” Despite all the tactical flexibility and political manoeuvrability he was to show later in his career, Hitler always insisted on these two goals with dogmatic rigidity.
“It will always remain one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich,” wrote Victor Klemperer in LTI, his 1946 analysis of Nazi language, “how this book could have been disseminated throughout the public sphere, and how nonetheless Hitler achieved his twelve-year rule. The bible of National Socialism was in circulation years before his rise to power.”103 Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had spelled out with exemplary clarity everything he intended to do if he was ever given power. Did the people who voted for him and who cheered him on not read it? Historians have long assumed they did not.104 Many of them cite the anecdote which Otto Strasser told in his 1940 book Hitler and I. When at the party conference in Nuremberg in 1927 Strasser had admitted to a circle of party functionaries that he had not read all of Mein Kampf, but merely memorised some of the more striking sentences, he claimed that others, including his brother Gregor and Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged not having read it either.105 If that was the case among Hitler’s most immediate subordinates, must it not also be true for his millions of followers—not to mention the many people who were not involved in the NSDAP?
Historian Othmar Plöckinger, however, has dismissed the idea of Mein Kampf being an “unread bestseller” as a myth that in the early years after the Second World War helped Germans to justify and excuse their behaviour.106 When it appeared in 1925, the first volume of Mein Kampf attracted a broad, mostly negative reaction in the mainstream press. In the Berlin magazine Das Tagebuch, liberal-left pundit Stefan Grossmann published an extensive review in which he questioned “the sanity of the author of these memoirs.” The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper opined that Hitler was “over and done with” after publishing his confession. On the other hand, the Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten called Hitler a “highly gifted man,” writing: “[He is] a true fighter for the convictions he has won in a life of struggle. Anyone who wants to get more closely acquainted with Hitler’s unique personality and to understand his actions should get hold of this book. Whether he sees it positively or critically, it is useful reading.”107 After the Nazis’ electoral successes in 1929 and 1930, many people apparently followed this advice. Not only did Mein Kampf ’s sales figures explode, but daily newspapers began mentioning the book more and more frequently. And by no means were the majority of the opinions as critical as the one published by Hellmut von Gerlach in the June
1932 issue of Die Weltbühne. “Whoever has read Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf,” Gerlach wrote, “will ask himself in horror how a sadistic master of confusion could become the preferred leader of a good third of the German people.”108
By the early 1930s at the latest, Mein Kampf had established itself as the party bible. Of course, not everyone who received the book after 1936 as a wedding gift studied it in detail, but it must be assumed that convinced National Socialists read at least major parts of it. The fact that the book was borrowed relatively frequently from libraries in the first years of the Third Reich also speaks for a genuine popular interest in it.109
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In late August 1924, Hitler was still convinced that he would be released once the first six months of his sentence were up on 1 October.110 By mid-September, he was comparing prices for a car he intended to buy when he got out of prison. “The difficulty for me is that in case of my release on 1 October, I cannot expect any major revenue from my work before mid-December so that I see myself compelled to ask for some sort of advance or a loan,” the automotive enthusiast Hitler wrote to Jakob Werlin, the head of the Munich office of Benz & Cie (later Daimler-Benz), who had visited him in Landsberg.111
If the prison authorities had got their way, Hitler would indeed have been released at the first possible opportunity. Otto Leybold was a great fan of his famous inmate. “I can’t find any fault with him,” the prison director told Franz Hemmrich. “He’s an idealist…When I hear him, I could almost become a National Socialist myself.”112 In a report he wrote on 15 September, Leybold praised Hitler as a “man of order and discipline.” He was “content, humble and eager to please,” someone who “did not make any demands” and was “at pains to accept the restrictions accompanying his incarceration.” Hitler had always behaved “politely and never in insulting form” towards prison employees. In Leybold’s opinion, Hitler had become “more mature and calmer” during his detention so that there was no reason to expect him to pose any further danger.113
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