Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf(My Struggle/My Battle)
Mein Kampf (English: My Struggle/My Battle) is a book by Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler’s National Socialist political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and volume 2 in 1926.
Mein Kampf is heavily influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which theorised propaganda as an adequate rational technique to control the seemingly irrational behaviour of crowds. Particularly prominent is the violent anti-Semitism of Hitler and his associates. For example, Hitler claimed that the international language Esperanto was part of a Jewish plot and makes arguments toward the old German nationalist ideas of “Drang nach Osten” and the necessity to gain Lebensraum (”living space”) eastwards (especially in Russia).
In this book, Hitler uses the main thesis of “The Jewish peril”, which speaks of an alleged Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership. The narrative describes the process by which he became increasingly antisemitic and militaristic, especially during his years in Vienna, Austria. Yet the deeper origins of his antisemitism remain a mystery. 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 anti-Semitic press, he says, he dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. A little later and quite suddenly, he accepted the same anti-Semitic views whole-heartedly, and they became crucial in his programme of national reconstruction. It was Zionism, which he calls a “great movement” in Mein Kampf, which he says settled his view (as theirs) that one cannot be both a German and a Jew.
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 twin evils: Communism and Judaism.
Mein Kampf has additionally been examined as a book on foreign policy. For example, Hitler predicts the stages of Germany’s political emergence on the world scene: in the first stage, Germany would, through a program of massive re-armament, overthrow the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and form alliances with the British Empire and Fascist Italy. The second stage would feature wars against France and her allies in Eastern Europe by the combined forces of Germany, Britain and Italy.
Hitler asserts in this book that German “Aryans” are at the top of the hierarchy while Jews, Gypsies and Negroes are consigned to the bottom of the order. Hitler goes on to say that dominated peoples benefit by learning from the superior Aryans. Hitler further claimed that the Jews were conspiring to keep this “master race” from rightfully ruling the world by diluting its racial and cultural purity and by convincing the Aryans to believe in equality rather than superiority and inferiority. He described the struggle for world domination as an ongoing racial, cultural and political battle between Aryans and non-Aryans.
This is the first complete English translations of Mein Kampf written by James Murphy in 1939 .
