Mein Kampf

Adolf Hitler

• Publisher: Studium Legis
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9788826070322
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Mein Kampf is a 1925 autobiographical book byNazi PartyleaderAdolf Hitler. The work outlines Hitler'spolitical ideology and future plansfor Germany. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. The book was edited by Hitler's deputyRudolf Hess.
Hitler began the book while imprisoned for what he considered to be "political crimes" followinghis failed Putsch in Munichin November 1923. Although Hitler received many visitors initially, he soon devoted himself entirely to the book. As he continued, Hitler realized that it would have to be a two-volume work, with the first volume scheduled for release in early 1925. The governor ofLandsbergnoted 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." 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.

MEIN KAMPF

Adolf Hitler

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

INTRODUCTION - AUTHOR’S PREFACE

CHAPTER I: IN THE HOME OF MY PARENTS

CHAPTER II: YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING IN VIENNA

CHAPTER III: POLITICAL REFLECTIONS ARISING OUT

OF MY SOJOURN IN VIENNA

CHAPTER IV: MUNICH

CHAPTER V: THE WORLD WAR

CHAPTER VI: WAR PROPAGANDA

CHAPTER VII: THE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER VIII: THE BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL

ACTIVITIES

CHAPTER IX: THE GERMAN LABOUR PARTY

CHAPTER X: WHY THE SECOND REICH COLLAPSED

CHAPTER XI: RACE AND PEOPLE

CHAPTER XII: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT

OF THE GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY

VOLUME II: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

CHAPTER I: WELTANSCHAUUNG AND PARTY

CHAPTER II: THE STATE

CHAPTER III: CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS OF THE STATE

CHAPTER IV: PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL OF THE

PEOPLE’S STATE

CHAPTER V: WELTANSCHHAUUNG AND ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER VI: THE FIRST PERIOD OF OUR STRUGGLE

CHAPTER VII: THE CONFLICT WITH THE RED FORCES

CHAPTER VIII: THE STRONG IS STRONGEST WHEN

ALONE

CHAPTER IX: FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS REGARDING THE

NATURE AND ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOPS

CHAPTER X: THE MASK OF FEDERALISM

CHAPTER XI: PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER XII: THE PROBLEM OF THE TRADE UNIONS

CHAPTER XIII: THE GERMAN POST-WAR POLICY OF

ALLIANCES

CHAPTER XIV: GERMANY’S POLICY IN EASTERN EUROPE

CHAPTER XV: THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENCE

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

INTRODUCTION - AUTHOR’S PREFACE

On April 1st, 1924, I began to serve my sentence of detention in the Fortress of Landsberg am Lech, following the verdict of the Munich People’s Court of that time.

After years of uninterrupted labour it was now possible for the first time to begin a work which many had asked for and which I myself felt would be profitable for the Movement. So I decided to devote two volumes to a description not only of the aims of our Movement but also of its development. There is more to be learned from this than from any purely doctrinaire treatise.

This has also given me the opportunity of describing my own development in so far as such a description is necessary to the understanding of the first as well as the second volume and to destroy the legendary fabrications which the Jewish Press have circulated about me.

In this work I turn not to strangers but to those followers of the Movement whose hearts belong to it and who wish to study it more profoundly. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.

Nevertheless, in order to produce more equality and uniformity in the defence of any doctrine, its fundamental principles must be committed to writing. May these two volumes therefore serve as the building stones which I contribute to the joint work.

The Fortress, Landsberg am Lech.

At half-past twelve in the afternoon of November 9th, 1923, those whose names are given below fell in front of the Feldherrnhalle and in the forecourt of the former War Ministry in Munich for their loyal faith in the resurrection of their people:

Alfarth, Felix, Merchant, born July 5th, 1901

Bauriedl, Andreas, Hatmaker, born May 4th, 1879

Casella, Theodor, Bank Official, born August 8th, 1900

Ehrlich, Wilhelm, Bank Official, born August 19th, 1894

Faust, Martin, Bank Official, born January 27th, 1901

Hechenberger, Anton, Locksmith, born September 28th, 1902

Koerner, Oskar, Merchant, born January 4th, 1875

Kuhn, Karl, Head Waiter, born July 25th, 1897

Laforce, Karl, Student of Engineering, born October 28th, 1904

Neubauer, Kurt, Waiter, born March 27th, 1899

Pape, Claus von, Merchant, born August 16th, 1904

Pfordten, Theodor von der, Councillor to the Superior Provincial Court, born May 14th, 1873

Rickmers, Johann, retired Cavalry Captain, born May 7th, 1881

Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, Dr. of Engineering, born January 9th, 1884

Stransky, Lorenz Ritter von, Engineer, born March 14th, 1899

Wolf, Wilhelm, Merchant, born October 19th, 1898

So-called national officials refused to allow the dead heroes a common burial.

So I dedicate the first volume of this work to them as a common memorial, that the memory of those martyrs may be a permanent source of light for the followers of our Movement.

The Fortress, Landsberg am Lech,

October 16th, 1924

CHAPTER I: IN THE HOME OF MY PARENTS

It has turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means should be employed.

German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the economic standpoint, still it ought to take place.

People of the same blood should be in the same Reich. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the territory of the Reich embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory.

The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.

And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German history. At the time of our Fatherland’s deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for the affair.

Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the Reich under Herr Severing’s regime.

In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were domiciled towards the end of the last century. My father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.

In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension.

But this did not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.

He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home. When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from ‘experience,’ he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown, with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for

‘something higher.’ As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was ‘somebody.’

He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.

Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.

It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during the more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days? At least, that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead him to appreciate his son’s oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I had in my head at that time.

This contradiction in my character made him feel somewhat anxious.

As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father’s books, I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military affairs.

But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question began to present itself: Is there a difference - and if there be, what is it between the Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?

That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to belong to Bismarck’s Empire. This was something that I could not understand.

It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the Realschule would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian Gymnasium. Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an official of the Government.

Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards the idea that his son should follow the same calling and if possible rise to a higher position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results of his own life’s industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son’s advancement in the same career.

He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in life to him. My father’s decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing ‘inexperienced’ and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility, something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.

And yet it had to be otherwise.

For the first time in my life - I was then eleven years old - I felt myself forced into open opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept ideas on which he set little or no value.

I would not become a civil servant.

No amount of persuasion and no amount of ‘grave’ warnings could break down that opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts which my father made to arouse in me a love or liking for that profession, by picturing his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one day I might be fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.

One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a young fellow who was by no means what is called a ‘good boy’ in the current sense of that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. Today, when my political opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the terrain on which all disputes were fought out.

Even attendance at the Realschule could not alter my way of spending my time.

But I had now another battle to fight.

So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be a painter - I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the Realschule; but he had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A painter? An artist-painter?" he exclaimed.

He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant.

But when I had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of what my own natural qualifications really were.

"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of the father’s obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic. But it stated something quite the contrary.

At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his

‘Never’, and I became all the more consolidated in my ‘Nevertheless’.

Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him. My father forbade me to entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his parental authority at all costs.

That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence, but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that I was making no progress at the Realschule, for weal or for woe, he would be forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.

I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me, especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter. What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. In another it read ‘avera...