Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf, political manifesto written by Adolf Hitler. It was his only complete book, and the work became the bible of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany’s Third Reich. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, and an abridged edition appeared in 1930. By 1939 it had sold 5,200,000 copies and had been translated into 11 languages.

The first volume, entitled Die Abrechnung (“The Settlement [of Accounts],” or “Revenge”), was written in 1924 in the Bavarian fortress of Landsberg am Lech, where Hitler was imprisoned after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It treats the world of Hitler’s youth, the First World War, and the “betrayal” of Germany’s collapse in 1918; it also expresses Hitler’s racist ideology, identifying the Aryan as the “genius” race and the Jew as the “parasite,” and declares the need for Germans to seek living space (Lebensraum) in the East at the expense of the Slavs and the hated Marxists of Russia. It also calls for revenge against France.

According to Hitler, it was “the sacred mission of the German people…to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements…and raise them to the dominant position.” “All who are not of a good race are chaff,” wrote Hitler. It was necessary for Germans to “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses, and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.” Hitler ascribed international significance to the elimination of Jews, which “must necessarily be a bloody process,” he wrote.

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Adolf Hitler

The second volume, entitled Die Nationalsozialistische Bewegung (“The National Socialist Movement”), written after Hitler’s release from prison in December 1924, outlines the political program, including the terrorist methods, that National Socialism must pursue both in gaining power and in exercising it thereafter in the new Germany.

In style, Mein Kampf has been appropriately deemed turgid, repetitious, wandering, illogical, and, in the first edition at least, filled with grammatical errors—all reflecting a half-educated man. It was skillfully demagogic, however, appealing to many dissatisfied elements in Germany—the ultranationalistic, the anti-Semitic, the antidemocratic, the anti-Marxist, and the military.

Although it initially had only limited success, Mein Kampf’s popularity grew as did that of Hitler and the Nazis. It eventually became required reading in Germany, and the government bought copies to give as state wedding gifts to newlyweds. After World War II various efforts were undertaken to limit access to the work. Postwar German law banned the sale and public display of books espousing Nazi philosophy. Moreover, the copyright for Mein Kampf had been awarded to the German state of Bavaria, which refused to grant publishing rights. However, foreign publishers continued to print the work, an act that brought condemnation both in Germany and in the countries where the book was published, not least because of its popularity with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. There also was great concern in some circles over the availability of the book from Internet-based booksellers. On January 1, 2016, the copyright for Mein Kampf expired, and the book entered public domain. Shortly thereafter Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History published a heavily annotated edition.