Mein Kampf: History's Most Evil Book

When one thinks of an ‘evil’ book, one naturally springs to mind before all others: Mein Kampf, the literary magnum opus of none other than Adolf Hitler, a man who needs no introduction on this channel dedicated to all things wicked and foul.

It is a monograph of malevolence, in quite a literal sense, as its words were directly responsible for persuading an entire population into embracing a set of putrid principles, and so, therefore, when you hold a copy of Mein Kampf, you are holding one of the many tools that the Nazi Regime used to kill 80 million people, both directly through genocide and repression, and indirectly through the vast cataclysmic war that it started.

And yet, while our initial impulses might compel us to want to destroy such a terrible tome, it is actually vitally important that it is not only read, but also understood, because as a wise man once said: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” So, with that in mind, we read it cover to cover, and now, we will share with you what we found.

What Is Mein Kampf?

Mein Kampf is, ultimately, a manifesto and ideological treatise that outlines the core ideas of National Socialism. It consists of two volumes, with the first being “A Reckoning,” and the second being “The National Socialist Movement.” Ostensibly, “A Reckoning” is meant to be an autobiographical section that outlines Hitler’s early life, and the experiences therein that led to him embracing National Socialism, particularly during the years he spent in Vienna prior to WWI, and “The National Socialist Movement,” which, as you probably guessed from the title, is intended to be a full expansion and explanation of National Socialist ideology. In reality, while Hitler largely sticks to that structure, both autobiographical and manifesto elements are found in both volumes.

But what of that ideology? What exactly did Hitler outline as its key tenets in Mein Kampf? Well, his writing style was… ‘rambling,’ to say the least, and as a reader you are left to filter out his key recurring ideas from an all over the place rollercoaster of… ‘diatribe,’ let’s call it.

One key aspect that will probably come as a surprise to no one watching was his racial ideology, which for Hitler manifested as a belief in a superiority of the German, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples (but mostly Germans), which he lumped together under the collective term of “Aryan.” Beyond them, Hitler presents an extended scale of the various, as he deems them, ‘lesser races,’ and their place on his genetic pecking order, with a particular hatred being reserved for Slavs and Jews. He also explains how in his belief, Aryans, as the supposed ‘superior’ race, not only could, but should lord over the ‘lesser races,’ quote:

“The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call—to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness—idealism.”

As for his specific denigration of Jews, he wrote the following, rather blunt synopsis of his position, quote:

“(The Jew) stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

And just to really drive this point home, an extract that lays Hitler’s racial ideology bare like no other is the following, quote:

“Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature’s restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. … Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one.

Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life.”

Separate from, but very closely tied to the racial ideology Hitler presented in Mein Kampf was also the idea of ‘Lebensraum,’ or Living Space, the notion that a revitalised and strong Germany would need extra land to support its growing Aryan population. According to Hitler, Lebensraum would come in two phases, the first being a reclamation of German territory lost following WWI, such as the City of Danzig in Poland, and the absorbing of German dominated foreign territories, such as the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the entirety of Austria. From there, land would be demanded in the East, and if it wasn’t given, it would be taken by force. On the want to eventually take fresh land to the East, Hitler wrote the following, quote:

“And so, we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.”

Beyond that, Hitler also introduced the idea of the ‘Führerprinzip,’ or Leader Principle, the idea that German politics should be dominated by a single, all powerful executive figure. This was a complete rejection of democratic governance, and a blatant endorsement of a totalitarian state. To explain this idea, he wrote the following, quote:

“They never understood that the strength of a political party lies by no means in the greatest possible independent intellect of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow the intellectual leadership. The decisive factor is the leadership itself.”

He then went on further to explain why this would supposedly produce a better leader than democratic means, quote:

“…the leadership principle may be imposed on an organized political community in a dictatorial way. But this principle can become a living reality only by passing through the stages that are necessary for its own evolution. These stages lead from the smallest cell of the State organism upwards. As its bearers and representatives, the leadership principle must have a body of men who have passed through a process of selection lasting over several years, who have been tempered by the hard realities of life and thus rendered capable of carrying the principle into practical effect.”

Hitler’s writings in Mein Kampf are also rabidly anti-Marxist, as to him, Marxism was nothing but an instrument of Jewish subversion, and a weapon they used to wage war on traditional culture. To explain this idea he wrote the following, quote:

“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus, it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man.”

Another huge aspect of Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf is that of Social Darwinism, i.e., the application of Darwinian principles to human societies. To explain this, he wrote the following, quote:

“He who would live must fight; he who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.”

It’s that last bit, the “has not the right to exist” bit where Hitler’s Social Darwinist ideas in Mein Kampf really go off the deep end of the pool, because he wasn’t being hyperbolic there, no, he really believed that those he deemed to be weak, those who didn’t wish to fight, as he put it, not only ought to be exterminated, but should be exterminated.

Not to worry however, because if you happen to think such a position is just a tad extreme, and we’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that that’s basically all of you reading, hopefully anyway, Hitler put a ‘rebuttal’ of your concerns in his next paragraph, quote:

“Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can overcome Nature and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease are her rejoinders.”

Obviously, we have only been able to scratch the surface of Mein Kampf’s contents here (to give you an idea, the copy of Mein Kampf we are referencing is 636 pages long), but still, it is enough to give you a foundational idea of what it was all about; in a nutshell—Germans were the best, Northern Europeans were a close second, basically everyone else was judged with some variation of “ew,” with Jews and Slavs being the worst, and to give Germany its ‘rightful’ place on the top of this racial totem pole, it needed a strong nationalist dictator not afraid of using violence to impose his will on foreign nations.

So, with that done, let us now move on to have a look at some of the wider context around the book.

Where Was Mein Kampf Written?

Mein Kampf was primarily written within the confines of Landsberg, a fortress-like ‘prison’ located in the state of Bavaria, Germany. When we say prison however, it is very much in inverted commas, because while Hitler was banged up while writing, conditions were far from the squalid hellhole you may initially imagine, and actually, it was quite the cushy abode.

The reason for this was that Landsberg housed political prisoners, ones that tended to not be terribly violent, and above all else, very well connected and wealthy. Hitler, for his part, wasn’t very wealthy at all in that period, and was in fact basically destitute, but he was very well connected, and thus he found himself in that cushy political prison.

For his part, he soon enough got to enjoy conditions as luxurious as any other inmates however, because you see, Hitler was a sex symbol to Nazi-leaning women, and they duly made sure their pookie bear got all the luxuries they thought he deserved while banged up. We also aren’t being hyperbolic or joking here, Hitler being a sex symbol was actually a thing… if you feel nauseous upon hearing that, don’t worry, that’s a normal response!

The ‘writing’ itself took place almost exclusively in Cell 7, Hitler’s cell. We say ‘writing’ like that, because actually, very little of Mein Kampf’s script was actually penned by Hitler’s hand, instead, it was largely penned by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s long-term friend and future Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, and Emil Maurice, Hitler’s driver, and friend, both of whom had been incarcerated alongside him. The manuscript was produced this way because Hitler preferred to… ‘let his ideas flow naturally,’ which in real terms, meant him pacing up and down his cell as he ranted and raved, with one of his two friends scribbling down the sh*t that came out of his mouth—this also makes the book a very difficult read, not just for its mad contents, but also due to its absolutely god awful, bordering on nonsensical at times, literary structure.

But just why was Hitler arrested in the first place? Well, let’s go on to discuss that, and more, in a new chapter.

Why Was Mein Kampf Written?

Hitler found himself in prison because on the 8th of November 1923, he launched a coup against the Bavarian Government. It all began at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, which Hitler burst into, fired a pistol into the air, and announced:

“The national revolution has broken out! The hall is surrounded by six hundred men. Nobody is allowed to leave.”

After a… ‘rousing’ speech, Hitler turned the crowd in the Beer Hall onto his side, and from then, it was on—the next day, after Nazi paramilitaries had been allowed the time to arm and assemble, they would march on the government.

And that was exactly what they did, as on the morning of the 9th of November, Hitler set out with 2,000 of his most fanatical supporters to march on the Bavarian Defence Ministry. He made it as far as down the road, until his way was blocked by 130 armed police officers, who promptly gunned down 15 Nazis, and ended the coup. Hitler fled the scene, was arrested two days later, and then sentenced to five years in prison for his part in the coup, thus bringing him to Landsberg.

This gave Hitler time to think. His coup had been a sloppy disaster, and actually, the more he thought about it, he realised his entire party was a sloppy disaster, being little more than a vaguely co-ordinated ensemble of differing nationalist splinter factions unified only by antisemitism and a certainty that they really loved Germany. That had to change, he thought, and so he put his mind to penning Mein Kampf, a tome that would help both the party, and him, in a number of ways.

Its first role was to serve as a political blueprint; a comprehensive guide and ideological manifesto for the National Socialist movement. His reasoning for this was simple enough, he wanted all Nazis to be singing from the same song sheet upon his release, so that rather than bickering amongst themselves on the finer points of antisemitism and nationalism, they could instead stand shoulder to shoulder as a unified, and therefore stronger, political force.

But in addition to being an ideological manifesto, Mein Kampf was also intended to be a practical one, one that plainly laid out what Hitler would actually do in real terms to ‘fix’ Germany should he ever come to power.

Beyond that, Hitler also wrote Mein Kampf to legitimize the Nazi Agenda, with the work intended to provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for the policies, and atrocities, that would no doubt be enacted if a Nazi regime did come to power. By framing his ideas around a historical and moral narrative, he was no longer just a nutter screaming rabidly about the Jews and yearning for past days of German glory, no, now he was a justified and legitimate political thinker, and his ‘radical’ views, were actually totally normal.

Some of Hitler’s motives for writing Mein Kampf were much more personal and selfish, however. Remember how we mentioned Hitler was flat broke around this time? Yeah, well it turns out Hitler was bitterly aware of that fact himself, and it wasn’t something that sparked much joy for him, and so, through Mein Kampf, he saw an opportunity; like a Professor that sets his own book as essential reading, Hitler would produce the essential text for National Socialism, and make sure that all the Reichsmarks it generated in sales went straight into his bank account. This made him a wealthy man almost immediately upon publication, and a very wealthy one after he came to power and it became mandatory reading for an entire country. We ultimately have no idea how much money he earned from sales of the books, but we know it was enough for him to move into one of Munich’s most luxurious apartments in 1929, fund a fleet of Mercedes for himself, and never have to draw a salary in the 12 years he ruled Germany.

When Was Mein Kampf Written?

As for when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, there isn’t too much to say here, Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg on the 1st of April 1924, and the book’s penning began shortly after that. Volume one was drafted by early 1925 after approximately eight months of work and published in July of that same year. Volume two was finished in early 1926, and first published in December 1926.

Hitler himself was released from prison on the 20th of December 1924, having completed only 264 days of his five-year sentence. This may have you thinking that what we told you earlier about the book being penned almost entirely in Landsberg prison is a load of old hockum, but worry not, historians typically agree that the bulk of Mein Kampf’s manuscript was written while he was incarcerated, with the time after his release being committed most to editing, and so Landsberg prison is generally accepted as the place where it was written.

The Impact of Mein Kampf

Where do we begin when it comes to assessing the impact of something like Mein Kampf? A book which wrought so much misery and destruction upon the world?

We might be inclined to start by measuring it the same way we would measure the impact of any book, by the number of copies it has sold. But this proves somewhat difficult in the case of Mein Kampf, as would you believe it, it turns out that Nazi Germany was somewhat motivated to overinflate and lie about the number of copies of its ‘holy’ text it had hawked off.

Despite this however, historians have managed to filter the truth from the nonsense, largely, and now largely agree that around 12 million copies were sold by the time the Nazi Empire came crumbling down in 1945, with the vast majority being German language texts, and comparatively limited numbers of translations in limited languages, with the early translations typically being in the ‘international’ languages of the day, i.e. English, and the languages of fascist sympathetic nations and allied nations, such as French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and Japanese.

Post-war the rights to Mein Kampf became the property of the Bavarian State, and they continued to allow it to be printed for scholarly reasons. They also facilitated its translation into many more languages, and so, as a result of both those things, that 12 million number has likely crept up by a million or so more, but we aren’t sure of exact numbers.

But to look at the impact of Mein Kampf through a purely commercial lens, as we would many other books, would not only be inappropriate, but would be downright insulting to the memory of the lives it played a major part in ending, and the misery it played a huge part in unleashing upon the world. So, let us now take a moment to take note of, and remember the great evil that this tome wrought upon the world.

The book’s vehement anti-Semitic and racial ideology contributed significantly to the climate of hatred and discrimination against those considered non-Aryan. It legitimised, and laid the groundwork for discriminatory racial laws, such as the Nuremberg Laws, and eventually, actualised genocide in the form of the Holocaust, within which up to 20 million Slavs, Jews, Poles, Serbs, Romani, and Slovenes were slaughtered in the most horrendous of circumstances—for no reason other than their race. Included in that 20 million figure also are Freemasons, the disabled, and homosexuals—all of whose deaths were promoted and legitimised by Mein Kampf.

The ideas of the book also directly led to the start of World War II, the single most deadly conflict in human history, in which as many as 80 million people died. This isn’t an exaggeration either, Mein Kampf wasn’t just a token bit of Nazi window dressing that sat around looking pretty while Hitler did his thing, no, it was a vital player in the sequence of events that led to war. Without Mein Kampf carrying Hitler’s message of expansion to the East and reclaiming lost territory to the masses, he never would have been able to gain mass popular support for the return of Danzig to Germany, and when that didn’t work politically, neither would he have had the German populace worked up into such a frenzied stupor that they would fervently support military action against Poland to see it returned, the very action that plunged the world into war.

Ultimately, uncomfortable though topics such as this are, and as much as we may quite understandably wish to bury our heads and forget about them, we cannot allow ourselves to do so. Like we said back at the beginning: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and only by understanding the horrors of Nazism can we ever hope to stop it from taking root again.

Key Takeaways

• Mein Kampf was written by Adolf Hitler while imprisoned in Landsberg, outlining National Socialist ideology.
• The book’s racial ideology promoted Aryan supremacy and led to widespread discrimination and genocide.
• Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum justified territorial expansion, contributing to the start of World War II.
• Mein Kampf legitimized the Nazi agenda and provided a pseudo-intellectual justification for their atrocities.
• Understanding Mein Kampf is crucial to learning from history and preventing similar horrors.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mein Kampf?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto and ideological treatise written by Adolf Hitler, outlining the core ideas of National Socialism. It consists of two volumes: ‘A Reckoning’ and ‘The National Socialist Movement.‘

Where was Mein Kampf primarily written?

Mein Kampf was primarily written in Landsberg prison, a fortress-like facility in the state of Bavaria, Germany.

Why was Hitler in prison when he wrote Mein Kampf?

Hitler was in prison for attempting a coup against the Bavarian Government on November 8, 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

What were Hitler’s main racial beliefs as outlined in Mein Kampf?

Hitler believed in the superiority of the German, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples, whom he collectively termed ‘Aryan.’ He viewed other races, particularly Jews and Slavs, as inferior and deserving of subjugation or extermination.

What is the concept of ‘Lebensraum’ as discussed in Mein Kampf?

Lebensraum, or Living Space, is the idea that a revitalized and strong Germany would need extra land to support its growing Aryan population. Hitler proposed reclaiming German territory lost after WWI and demanding land in the East.

What is the ‘Führerprinzip’ and how is it explained in Mein Kampf?

The ‘Führerprinzip,’ or Leader Principle, is the idea that German politics should be dominated by a single, all-powerful executive figure. Hitler rejected democratic governance and endorsed a totalitarian state, believing that disciplined obedience to a strong leader was essential.

How did Hitler’s anti-Marxist views influence his writing in Mein Kampf?

Hitler viewed Marxism as an instrument of Jewish subversion aimed at destroying traditional culture. He believed it rejected the natural aristocratic principle and promoted the mass over individual merit.

What is Social Darwinism as presented in Mein Kampf?

Social Darwinism in Mein Kampf is the application of Darwinian principles to human societies, advocating that the strong should dominate and the weak should be exterminated. Hitler believed that those who did not fight for their existence did not deserve to live.

What was the impact of Mein Kampf on World War II?

The ideas in Mein Kampf directly led to the start of World War II by promoting the expansion to the East and reclaiming lost territory. This fueled German aggression and led to the invasion of Poland, which triggered the war.

How many copies of Mein Kampf were sold by the end of World War II?

Approximately 12 million copies of Mein Kampf were sold by the time the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945, with the vast majority being in German.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Mein Kampf: History’s Most Evil Book
• Hero image source by Ekrem Canli / openverse, by-sa.

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