Mein Kampf at 100 — why the most reviled book in history still haunts us
There was no shortage of evidence of the Holocaust, of the slaughters of the Eastern Front and other war crimes. But one item had particular resonance. 'May it please the tribunal,' Jones said, 'it is now my duty to draw to the tribunal's attention a document which became the statement of faith of these defendants.'
Mein Kampf is 100 years old this month. The centenary will reinforce Germans' determination to keep the odious book buried. But I recently set myself the task of understanding it better, to see what lessons it provides — not just for Germany, but for all countries.
It was not a straightforward assignment. My Jewish father escaped Czechoslovakia by the skin of his teeth in the summer of 1939. Several members of his extended family were killed in the camps. He rarely spoke of his ordeal, and I never got to ask him about my strange surname.
I had never read Mein Kampf. Almost nobody has, or says they have, although everyone knows the title. It took nerves of steel to plough through the 700-page tome, which is what I did, 30 pages a night, in German and then in English. My research also required some subterfuge, using the term 'MK' in emails to spare my interviewees any embarrassment.
Hitler originally wanted to call his book Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice but was persuaded to make it shorter. It is both a carefully crafted biography (riddled with inventions and falsifications) and a job application.
• Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List
The Germany of the 1920s was deeply unstable. Defeat in the First World War had changed everything. The Kaiserreich was no more, the army had been emasculated, the economy was in ruins. The new Weimar Republic, with its fragile parliamentary democracy, was for Hitler and his supporters a byword for weakness and decadence.
In 1923 Hitler led the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When it failed he was sent to jail, but given a light sentence and a large, comfortable cell. Landsberg prison may have been called a fortress, but for its most celebrated inmate it was more a political meeting room.
'Hitler made an announcement in a newspaper. He asked all his friends and politicians not to visit him any more,' says the German historian Othmar Plöckinger, author of a landmark study of Mein Kampf. 'He wanted now to start seriously writing his book.' He needed a manifesto to propel him on to the fragmented political scene.
As well as repulsive, it is a curious book. It could have done with some serious editing. Much of the time the writing is repetitive and barely coherent. Sometimes Hitler veers into strange tangents on the Habsburg or Japanese empires. Some passages are moderately rational, but all too often the author can't help himself. There are 467 mentions of the word Jew or its derivations, 64 mentions of poison, 14 of parasite, 27 of disease and 167 of blood.
Along with history, Hitler's main themes are sociology and a horrifically distorted understanding of biology. He borrows ideas from late-19th and early 20th-century ideologues such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-French-German philosopher who propagated theories of ethno-nationalism and racial superiority that were standard at the time. Others, such as the political scientist Carl Schmitt, focused on the acquisition of power. Some ideas were copied; others, such as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution , were traduced to fit his agenda.
Hitler saw the fate of people as being driven by the law of racial struggle; the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker. 'Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf etc.' There are pages and pages of this stuff on racial purity, eugenics and the urgent need for Germans to acquire space to live, Lebensraum.
For Hitler, Aryan supremacy was evident in all walks of life, from biology to high art. 'Everything we admire on this earth today — science and art, technology and inventions — is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.'
He found many groups responsible for the humiliation of the German people, the Treaty of Versailles, the 'stab in the back'. He blamed the communists, the media, the liberal elite, homosexuals and the French.
But he blamed one group in particular. 'Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word 'Jew' first gave me ground for special thoughts. For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an antisemite.' There is worse, much worse, but I won't put readers through it.
• The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees review — warnings from history
Volume one was published in July 1925. The first print run of 10,000 sold out within months. But sales quickly tailed off and the second volume, released a year later, fared much worse. Reviews ranged from supportive to outraged to dismissive. Cultured Germany wouldn't be taken in by such ramblings, was the prevailing response.
But sales picked up again as Hitler closed in on power. After 1933 it was deemed patriotic to own a copy. Local councils were instructed to distribute it to married couples. As war loomed, soldiers were handed pocket versions; it became not so much something to read as a devotional object.
Hitler received the royalties, and according to a 1939 article in Time magazine, the Führer had amassed more than $3 million (the equivalent of about $70 million today) from German sales alone.
Versions in English and other languages tended to tighten up and sanitise the message. President Roosevelt — who came to power just a month after Hitler, and was fluent in German — scribbled this in his abridged 1933 translation: 'This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.'
On Germany's surrender, Hitler's assets were confiscated. The postwar authorities and the western Allies faced two competing priorities — de-Nazification and building democracy, in which freedom of expression was central. They came up with the ingenious idea of using copyright law: for the next 70 years it would be illegal to publish new versions of Mein Kampf in Germany, although it remained available around the world.
It took much longer than non-Germans realise for Germany to reckon with its history. It wasn't until the late 1960s that a new generation started to confront their parents. Alongside discussion forums and TV talk shows, a new theatrical genre emerged. One of the first to deal directly with Mein Kampf was Helmut Qualtinger, an Austrian actor who read out excerpts on stage.
In the 1990s a Turkish-born German comedian called Serdar Somuncu used ridicule and satire in a show called The Legacy of a Mass Murderer. Yasemin Yildiz, a cultural historian, describes the atmosphere: 'People were laughing out loud. He enabled them to have this bodily release through humour, which aimed to make Hitler smaller. A lot of the postwar period [had] dealt with this anxiety around him by making him demonic.'
As for the book, many copies continued to sit in people's homes — sometimes stashed away in attics or cellars, coming to light only when the war generation passed on and their children or grandchildren went through their belongings.
When the copyright ran out in 2015, a decision was taken to republish Mein Kampf, officially, under the watchful eye of experts at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Their task would be to produce a critical edition, inserting notes on every page, detailing distortions, falsehoods and the ensuing horrors. It triggered an impassioned public debate, including within Germany's Jewish community. There was a flurry of sales in the first year or so of publication, largely to scholars or curious members of the public, but that didn't last.
Job done? Not at all. You can find the book in shops, if you look hard enough, and more easily online, both the sanitised version and the original. But that, in my view, is the least of the problem.
What I have found, during months of interviews and research, is that the messages contained in Mein Kampf have not gone away. They can be found all over the world on the internet; on YouTube and elsewhere bloggers, vloggers and agitators borrow the themes of the 1920s and 1930s.
• Ideology is at the heart of terrorism, says extremism tsar
They do not usually cite Mein Kampf directly. Perhaps they think it will taint them. Perhaps they think it's no longer relevant or cool. But its ideas have moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Comparing passages with speeches by leading American and European politicians, who talk of 'ethnic replacement' and 'poisoning the blood', there is a similar focus on grievance, resentment and encirclement. This includes speeches and social posts from Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump.
During a campaign rally in December 2023, the man who is now US president said: 'They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're destroying our country. They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, 'Oh Hitler said that, in a much different way.'' There is more like it. Chapter two, volume two of Mein Kampf, titled The State, says: 'The poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people … have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.'
I know this is deeply contentious territory. I am fully aware that anyone cross-referencing modern-day populism with the 1920s and 1930s lays themselves open to being denounced as simplistic or plain wrong. No two political movements or historic moments are exactly alike. I am not trying to say that today's leaders will follow Hitler. Words don't inevitably lead to actions.
But what I am saying is that, for all the efforts to eradicate this book's ideas, some of them have returned into the heart of global politics.
Banning the spirit of Mein Kampf has turned out to be harder than anyone realised. Just as Hitler recycled existing material, so his book is being refashioned for our times. It's part of a continuum. His ideas have always been there, and they have never gone away.
Archive on 4: 100 Years of Mein Kampf is on BBC Radio 4, Jul 5 at 8pm and then on BBC Sounds
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
Horst Mahler, far-left terrorist who became a neo-Nazi
One of the strangest German lives in the post-second world war era closed on 27 July 2025 with the death of Horst Mahler at the age of 89. Mahler's life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics of the far-left and ultra-right, since he converted from being a hunted and jailed leader and lawyer of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to become Germany's most notorious neo-Nazi, an outspoken anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier – activities for which he also spent time in jail in his old age. Even more extraordinarily, Mahler was also a one-time legal partner of his friend Gerhard Schroeder, Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor from 1998 to 2005. As a young lawyer, Schroeder had defended Mahler and other RAF terrorists and led a successful campaign to readmit Mahler to the German Bar after he was briefly disbarred. If you want a British parallel, imagine Tony Blair defending members of the Angry Brigade in his youth. Mahler was born in Silesia (now in Poland) in 1936. The family was forced to flee west in the face of the advancing Soviet Red Army at the end of the war. Mahler's father was especially anxious to avoid the Russians, as he was an ardent Nazi, and appears to have passed his ideas on to his son. At university, where he studied law, young Horst joined one of the ultra-nationalist and conservative 'bursenschaften' – elite student societies that combined drinking and duelling with sabres. He also joined the youth arm of Germany's moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) but soon migrated to the far-left Marxist wing of the movement. The late 60s were a period of foment among West Germany's students, with frequent violent clashes between police and students protesting against the Vietnam War and against the staunchly right-wing tabloid newspaper empire of Press tycoon Axel Springer. After the shooting of the leftist Student leader Rudi Dutschke, Mahler converted his left-wing legal practice into a hotbed of the so-called 'extra-Parliamentary opposition'. His lifelong journey into illegality under the cover of the law had begun. Mahler became an active terrorist in 1968 when he organised the springing from a Berlin courtroom of Andreas Baader, an early leader of the RAF, and Baader's girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin during the couple's trial for firebombing a department store. For much of the 1970s and 80s, West Germany was convulsed by the activities of the RAF, a violent group of middle-class radicals who pursued their version of the class struggle by shooting down working-class cops, bombing 'bourgeois' symbols like department stores and US army bases, robbing banks and kidnapping and killing business leaders. They moved between their targets in fast BMWs which were nicknamed 'Baader-Meinhof Wagons' as a result. I lived in Germany at the time among such student leftists, and many a night passed in anguished debates in our communal flats as to whether the RAF's violent acts were the right way of achieving a socialist society. One morning a flatmate seized me and pushed my face against the wall lest I should recognise and betray an on-the-run RAF fugitive who had spent the night in the apartment. The thoroughly alarmed West German state responded to the challenge with crackdowns of dubious legality, but eventually the RAF militants were all hunted down and jailed. Here, some of them emulated the IRA and starved themselves to death, while others committed suicide with pistols smuggled into their cells by their lawyers. Mahler was one of those lawyers before going on the run himself with a price on his head as a hunted terrorist. He spent some time with his comrades in Palestine, undergoing military training with the PLO which almost certainly fuelled his own growing anti-Semitism. Returning to Germany, Mahler was finally caught and jailed. Hailed as a martyr by Germany's far left, by the time of his release Mahler's political views had undergone a dramatic sea change. At the funeral of a far-right activist, Mahler claimed that Germany was an 'occupied land', controlled by foreign forces in the pay of an international Jewish conspiracy. He put his new beliefs into practice by joining the neo-Nazi NPD party and defended it in court against attempts to ban it as unconstitutional. He soon proclaimed such classic Nazi ideas openly, and for the last quarter century of his life the ageing Mahler was in and out of the jails where he had spent so many years, but this time for such crimes as Holocaust denial and trying to revive Nazism. By the end of his days Horst Mahler had returned to the warped ideas he had first learned at his father's knee.
Times
13 hours ago
- Times
RIP Mitteleuropa — the tragedy of a lost civilisation
For more than a week in autumn 1790 the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt was the scene of one of the oldest and most extravagant political rituals on the European continent: kings, queens, princes, ambassadors and assorted aristocrats gathered for a series of events culminating in the coronation of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as Holy Roman Emperor. Goethe, a native of the city, claimed that anyone watching could not fail to consider the celebration as the 'crowning glory of his whole life'. The future statesman Klemens von Metternich called it 'one of the most sublime and simultaneously magnificent spectacles that the world has ever seen'. A concert given by Mozart, who had travelled from Vienna in an attempt to revive his flagging career, proved a sideshow. Leopold, who, like many of his predecessors, was a member of the House of Habsburg, died of pneumonia just 18 months later before having had the chance to implement many of his planned liberalising reforms. Francis II, his more conservative son, managed 14 years, but in 1806, after military defeats by Napoleon, was obliged to abolish the title and continued to rule as mere Emperor of Austria. The coronation of the new head of a curious entity that Voltaire famously quipped was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire is an appropriate starting point for this detailed study of the part of the continent where the Germanic, Slavic and Romance worlds meet. The term Central Europe, or rather Mitteleuropa in German, was coined — appropriately enough also in 1806 — by Georg Hassel, a German geographer who defined it as the space between Russian-dominated northern and eastern Europe and the British Isles and France to the west. There is no shortage of histories of the various peoples of the region, nor of the Habsburgs, who ruled much of the area for more than 600 years. Luka Ivan Jukic, a London-based author and journalist, aims instead 'to disentangle the history of Central Europe from the histories of the many nations that have emerged from it and to show that Central European history is much more than the sum of its parts'. • How Europe forgot its history and sleepwalked into crisis Foremost among these parts were the German-speakers, long the dominant political, economic and cultural force — something they came to consider proof of their innate superiority, with disastrous consequences under Hitler. They shared the space with Hungarians, various types of Slavs — from the Poles in the north to the Croats in the south — as well as northern Italians, Lithuanians and Jews. Jukic writes fluently and peppers his book with colourful anecdotes. His decision to weave the different peoples' respective stories into a single chronological narrative makes sense, especially for times such as 1848, when a wave of revolutions promised to transform Central Europe (as would happen in 1989). The same is true of phenomena such as industrialisation and the construction of the railways. Often, though, the sheer number of separate narratives and the need to switch back and forth between places can be overwhelming. The book is subtitled The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea. Central Europe, he contends, was killed as a distinct civilisation by the Nazis as they marched eastwards. Nor did Allied victory in 1945 herald its return: the continent's rigid division into capitalist west and communist east left no space for anything in between. The idea endured, however, in the minds of cultured Czechs, Poles and Hungarians resentful of having been forcibly separated from the European mainstream after centuries and trapped on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain — as evinced by the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his 1983 essay The Tragedy of Central Europe. • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The collapse of communism at the end of that decade brought another change of direction: admission to Nato and then to the EU from the late 1990s required the adoption of what Jukic calls the 'prescriptive bundle of policies that accompanied becoming a 'normal' western country' — from the rule of law to an economic system based on the primacy of free markets. The first generation of post-communist leaders such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa were happy to oblige. Their citizens' reward for enduring an initial few painful years of 'shock therapy' were soaring living standards and the satisfaction of escaping a Russian-dominated world in which their neighbours to the east remained mired. But what of Central Europe today? The emergence of the so-called Visegrád Group of Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics in the 1990s pointed to a sense of shared regional destiny. The illiberal approach of Hungary's Viktor Orban and Poland under its former Law and Justice Party government to touchstone issues such as gay rights and immigration could be taken as reflecting more conservative attitudes in the middle of the continent than in Europe's liberal west. Jukic nevertheless believes the differences between the countries of Central Europe outweigh their similarities — all the more so if Germany is considered one of their number. If anything unites them it is the legacy of their years of communism rather than the centuries spent under Habsburg rule. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List 'What emerged from the ruins of communist eastern Europe was not a suppressed cosmopolitan Central Europe but a series of nation-states forged in the upheavals of the early 20th century that had destroyed that very same Central European world,' he concludes. 'It is only natural that since 1989 each of these nation-states has interpreted that legacy in their own way, trying to come to terms with their own histories and places in a new world not as Central Europeans but as Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats.'Peter Conradi is author of Who Lost Russia? From the Collapse of the USSR to Putin's War on Ukraine (Oneworld £10.99) Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea by Luka Ivan Jukic (Hurst £25 pp344). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
The Guardian
20 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘She should answer for what she did': trial of ex-Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina begins
Rakib Hossain was just 11 years old when, standing innocently on the streets of Dhaka in July last year, he was killed by a bullet to the head – fired allegedly by the police. Hossain was one of more than 1,400 men, women and children killed in Bangladesh's so-called July revolution, when hundreds of thousands across the country rose up in protest against the country's leader, Sheikh Hasina. Her attempts to crush the mass movement included deploying heavily armed police, who – with shoot to kill orders – fired live ammunition at civilians on the streets. Ultimately, the crackdown was unsuccessful and Hasina was forced to flee Bangladesh in a helicopter on 5 August last year, as angry protesters marched towards her residence and the military refused to forcefully stop them. Now, just over a year since he was killed, the trial of Hasina will begin on 3 August, as she stands accused of being responsible for the death of the 11-year-old and many others over those weeks. After months of evidence gathering, Bangladeshi prosecutors have charged her with crimes against humanity, including charges of order, incitement, complicity, conspiracy, and abetment of murder, torture and other inhuman acts. Her trial will be held before three judges of Bangladesh's international crimes tribunal (ICT); a court that Hasina set up herself while in power. Hasina will not be there. Since last August, she has been in India despite protests by the interim government leading Bangladesh. Multiple extradition requests for Hasina have been ignored. With the possibility she would be given the death penalty if found guilty, few believe Hasina will come back voluntarily. She has refused to be part of the proceedings except to plead not guilty, and has been given a state-appointed defence lawyer as she is being tried in absentia. In the days leading up to the trial, efforts have been made by Hasina and her Awami League party to discredit it and the tribunal, denying the charges and claiming they had received no formal legal notices of them. In an open letter published on Friday, Hasina described the protests that toppled her as a 'violent interruption of our hard-fought democracy' and promised to 'reclaim the institutions that were unlawfully seized'. Hossain's father, Abul Khayer, spoke of his anger that Hasina would not be present in court. 'I want to see Hasina tried in person,' he said. 'She should face the families and answer for what she did. But India won't give her back. Everyone knows that.' A year since his son was killed, Khayer said his grief had hardened into disillusionment and he expressed doubts that the tribunal would deliver true justice or accountability. After the toppling of Hasina a wave of optimism gripped Bangladesh, as an interim government led by Nobel prize-winner Muhammad Yunus was brought in with sweeping promises of democratic reform and accountability. But faith in the interim government has faded over the past year as many of the promised reforms have failed to materialise and Yunus has struggled to bring the deteriorating law and order situation and attacks against minorities under control. With the country's first elections since the fall of Hasina due in February, Khayer feared the trial would become politicised. 'Everyone has seen in the past how most often these kinds of cases have been used to gain political scores,' he said. 'The trials are dragged for years to serve people's political ambition.' Still, he insisted the trial should still go forward, if only to document the truth. 'I don't need her to sit in a dock to know what she did. She gave the orders. Everyone knows that. Let the world hear it.' For the many who saw their relatives and friends killed last July, the trial is a vital first step towards justice. While some senior government ministers and police officials were arrested, many in Hasina's regime fled the country and remain abroad. In an effort to make the trial as transparent as possible, much of it will be live streamed on television, except for moments where sensitive witnesses are testifying. It is also just the beginning. Investigators are still working on bringing Hasina to trial for a ream of other atrocities allegedly committed during her 15 years in power, including enforced disappearances and the killing, torture and mass incarceration of opponents and critics. Mohammad Tajul Islam, the chief prosecutor of the ICT, said the prosecution and investigation agency of the court had been 'working relentlessly' since September to find witnesses and gather evidence to bring Hasina to trial. He described it as a 'very challenging task, particularly because destruction of evidence and the involvement of a huge number of perpetrators'. Islam noted that some of those allegedly involved remained in positions of power, often making victims and witnesses reluctant to come forward. He said he was confident that the prosecution had a strong case to prove crimes against humanity were committed by Hasina. Among the key witnesses will be her former police chief Chowdhury Abdullah al-Mamun, who has already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the former prime minister. While some have questioned whether Bangladesh's judicial system – which was systematically eroded under Hasina – was capable of conducting a free and fair trial for Hasina, Islam said reforms had brought the ICT in line with international best practices. 'It is critical for accountability and the rule of law, and also for the victims who seek justice,' he said. 'Her intended absence from the trial should not shield her from justice.' Mohammad Arafat, who served as a senior minister in Hasina's government and is also facing charges, called the tribunal a 'political show trial'. 'The Awami League categorically rejects the politically motivated charges brought against its leadership,' he said. 'I urge the international community to recognise this tribunal for what it is: a tool to criminalise political opposition and rewrite lawful governance as criminality.' Mubashar Hasan, a political scientist who was forced into exile after he was abducted and tortured and is now a researcher at Western Sydney University, was among those who said that in an 'ideal scenario' Hasina would instead be put on trial at the international criminal court in The Hague. The Yunus-led interim government has already banned Hasina's Awami League party from taking part in the elections expected early next year, but critics have said this undermines the democratic nature of the polls, given that Awami League is still one of the country's largest parties. The election is expected to be swept by the Bangladesh Nationalist party, whose leadership suffered years of persecution under Hasina. Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamist party which was banned under Hasina, is also expected to do well, which has raised concerns about the rise of Islamic hardliners undermining the country's secular foundations.
