Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)

Front matter

NOT ONE CENT OF ROYALTY TO HITLER

ADOLF HITLER’S OWN BOOK

A NEW UNEXPURGATED TRANSLATION CONDENSED WITH CRITICAL COMMENTS and Explanatory Notes

Hitler's Book, "Mein Kampf", for 15 Years Has Warned of Scheme for World Conquest

Does Adolf Hitler seek to dominate the world by force?

Will the sabre-rattling Fuehrer who welded 80,000,000 Germans into a mighty military machine invade the rest of the world from his fortress in Cen­tral Europe?

President Roosevelt thinks so. On Friday, March 30th, he was in constant communication with Europe by underseas telephone. The same day a White House official revealed our Government’s fear “that Hitler would not stop with Europe, but would carry his program of conquest to other continents, possibly the Americas.”

Prime Minister Chamberlain now thinks so. Pledging Britain’s might to defend Poland against invasion on that same day, he has dramatically reversed England’s historical policy by guaranteeing prompt military aid to a country east of the Rhine.

A bogeyman? Too absurd?

We believe not. Hitler’s actions will not surprise readers of “Mein Kampf”, the Nazi Bible which Dorothy Thompson has labelled “blueprint to word domination.”

Surprising, rather, are the jitters and tremblings of the rest of the world which, in “Mein Kampf”, could have found a complete revelation of the former Austrian house-painter’s bold schemes.

For no Napoleon, no other world-conqueror—ever has revealed in advance his ambitions and his technique, which is precisely what Herr Hitler in “Mein Kampf” has done—for all the world to see.

The ruthless policy which Der Fuehrer now pursues was outlined 15 years ago, when he wrote this book while lying in the prison fortress of Landsberg on the Lech, convicted of plotting to overthrow the German goverment by force.

Now that Hitler’s first ambitions have been realized, it behooves the rest of the world carefully to read his book, no matter how illogical, fantastic, it may seem, no matter whether you hate Hitler or hero-worship him.

Since it will directly affect the daily lives, hopes, fears, of hundreds of millions of peaceful citizens far removed from Berlin or Berchtesgaden, “Mein Kampf” may be called the most important political tract of all time.

“Mein Kampf” should he read in conjunction with the timeable of Hitler’s “strategy of piecemeal conquest”—conveniently provided in a secret Nazi propaganda map discovered by Czech police who raided Nazi headquarters in Prague during last September’s crisis, and published here for the first time.

In “Mein Kampf” Hitler tells us what he is going to do and how he will do it.

In this map he telly us when.

England to Be a German Province

Adolf Hitler states emphatically in “Mein Kampf” that he intends to dominate this planet by force. “Raising the German people slowly and surely to a dominating position”, he promises to settle down only after the “conquest of the world by the German.”

Hitler intends to carry this out by “the weapon of ruthless, brute force.” His method is “violent attack.” Early in his career he “realized the value of physical terror against the masses.”

“Mein Kampf” 15 years ago supplied the key to present-day power politics in Europe. Creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the attempt to ally with Great Britain, the “Drang nach Osten”—push to the East and the Ukraine, are all predicted.

“If we want allies” he wrote, “two are possible, England and Italy.”

He has courted England, but Britannia—always shy—has finally taken fright and sought other friends.

The Nazi propaganda map shown on page 16 destines the British Isles to become a German province after 1941!

Italy, with her “inferior race”, is selected, and Hitler must give her a temporary share in the spoils. But according to the map, Hitler bottles up Mussolini in his own lake by snatching Gibraltar, guarding the Mediterranean’s western entrance, for himself.

France is the “everlasting enemy of the German people”, Hitler writes. She is doomed for destruction in 1941, according to the map, and Germany “smashing France and protecting her rear” can then proceed to bigger game.

Will Hitler try to conquer the Ukraine? That is the question uppermost in European minds today because that means war with Russia. “Yes” wrote Hitler 15 years ago.

“When we speak today of new territory in Europe, we can think only of Russia” “Mein Kampf” informs. Hitler will teach Germans to “gaze to the land of the East.” Then “as of old, the Reich would again have to send Knights marching out armed with the German sword, to give soil to the German plough and bread to the German people.”

The map earmarks the Ukraine for conquest in 1941, after France is smashed. The rest of Russia up to the Urals, the British Isles, Scandinavia—all Europe and part of Asia are destined for Nazi domination between 1941 and 1948!

Audacious best describes Adolf Hitler’s methods, fantastic his character. “He is an infantile personality” says Proefssor Oscar J. Raeder, famous Boston University psychiatrist. “His temper tantrums, his weeping and similar emotional manifestations under stress are childhood fixations.”

Devastating hatred, above all, characterizes Hitler. “A psychopathic paranoid personality whose sole need is hatred” is how Dr. A. A. Brill of New York describes him. “All his actions are dominated by this sadistic leitmotif. His hatred of Jews and love for Germans are mere excuses for his algolagnia—his pleasure in pain.”

Never in history has any one man unleashed such torrents of hatred upon the world, setting man against man, nation against nation. That is his technique:

“A single enemy must be pushed forward and all hate concentrated upon this sole opponent”, Hitler writes. “Part of the genius of a true leader,” he says, “is to make widely different enemies appear to he one.”

Circumstances gave him the Jews, the World War, the Treaty of Versailles.

If the handful of Jews in Germany hadn’t existed, he would have had to create them! “A savage attack upon some adversary is proof to the people of the justice of their own cause.”

If the World War had not occured, he would have had to provoke one! When it broke out, “I fell on my knees and thanked heaven with all my heart that it had granted me the fortune to live this day.”

If the Allies had not dictated the Treaty of Versailles he would have had to invent it! “How Versailles could have been used” he writes, “to ignite great flames of national passion!”

With Adolf Hitler once installed as undisputed master of the German Reich, can the rest of the world breathe easier? Is Nazism not really an article for export? Will not the whims, hates, insane prejudices of this man leap over national boundaries and embroil the world in the bloodiest war in history?

Fifteen years ago “Mein Kampf” warned the world of its fate.

“Every attempt made for the sake of a world idea fails unless the struggle tales the form of a violent attack”, Hitler wrote. But having “redeemed” his German brothers in Austria and Czechoslovakia, can we really now rest in peace?

“Such enthusiasm as war enthusiasm, once broken, cannot easily be awakened again” Hitler believes. “It is intoxication and it should be kept.”

Greatest Liar On Earth

How is it possible that a once highly cultured and civilized nation can be duped by the torrent of clumsy forgery, deliberate lies, perversion, and violent hatred that all eminent scholars agree “Mein Kampf” to be?

Most audaciously, Herr Hitler gives us the clue to his technique. No man ever despised more completely the “primitive”, “herdlike” masses whom he intends to dupe.

“Accustomed to telling insignificant lies themselves,” he writes “the masses can detect them. They are more easily misled by a great lie than a tiny lie. But never having dreamed of the vast possibilities of lies, they generally fail to detect a truly gigantic distortion.”

So Herr Hitler made himself the greatest liar on earth!

He confesses this a dozen times in “Mein Kampf”. No matter how fantastic, lies “must be drummed into the minds and feelings of the people by constant repetition.”

Hitler frankly admits his prevaricating ways. “Even when in the process of being enlightened as to the actual truth … after a great lie has once been told, (the masses) will for a long time have their doubts, completely unable to believe that some truth was not contained … This is a fact which all the great falsifiers know so well.”

Perfectly staggering is this brazen declaration of a scheme to dominate every thought, action and word of every man, woman and child by the methods of witchcraft and voodoo, of totem and taboo.

A single enemy! Hitler has exploited the Jews, perhaps beyond the point of diminishing returns. For propaganda their value is now nearly nil, and the Nazis are flogging corpses, only holding them until relatives abroad pay ransom. Observers in Germany claim that after the November pogroms the man in the street, though silent, is finally shocked.

The stage is set, therefore, for the creation and destruction of another great enemy, a Nazi Scapegoat No. 2.

All signs point to the Catholic Church. The Jews, scattered over the four quarters of the globe, have no international organization, and Herr Hitler knows it. But the Catholic Church is a true and active “International”—the oldest—with headquarters in Rome.

It is rich. A safe estimate of Catholic Church wealth in Germany would be about $20,000,000,000, and it can be plundered. (This has been quietly done by accusing priests and nuns of violating foreign exchange laws, then fining them heavily.)

Writes the Voelkischer Beobachter, official Nazi party paper, on Oct. 15th:

“We are armed to continue the battle against

Catholicism until the point of total annihilation.”

Plunder is necessary today in Germany. The Jews were legally robbed of any remaining wealth in November 1938. On March 25th, 1939, the government announced it would henceforth pay 40% of its bills in “scrip”. Foreign experts writing from Germany agree this will mean half inflation, half a capital levy on industry, to the tune of several billion marks.

Another juicy plum, therefore, mast be ripened for Nazi plucking.

How explain the character of Adolf Hitler—self-confessed liar, hater, world-conqueror, propagator of lustful war?

Were he merely a private citizen of the Reich we could relegate him to obscurity—or let the State commit him to some institution.

But Hitler holds a death grip on the lives of 80,000,000 able-bodied Germans, controls a dreadful war machine. Therefore his flights of fancy, the state of his liver, his whole character as revealed in “Mein Kampf” command penetrating analysis.

Something haunts Adolf Hitler.

His father—illegitimate at birth—died drunk in a village tavern. Hitler, who investigates every German’s ancestry, cannot prove who his own grandfather was.

Under present Nazi sterilization laws, Adolf Hitler himself would never have beer born!

Hitler does not touch meat, tobacco, alcohol in any form. It is generally believed that he has never had sexual relations with a woman.

What obsesses Hitler? He abhors “filth”, “scum”, “pollution.” This confessed destroyer, liar, and hater worships “purity” and “cleanliness”.

The explanation is not difficult to find. “Purity” in Hitler’s mind becomes purity of blood and “race”. Germans must not mix with Italians, Frenchmen should not marry Englishmen. Somehow the Germen nation has sinned against its “race”.

But once Germany cleanses itself, regains the pure blood of the Nordic ancestors whose barbarism Hitler denies, then Germans—with Hitler at their head—can conquer the earth. Der Fuehrer has undergone a psychic experience and that is his Revelation.

The Jews, Hitler admits, remain one of the purest races on earth, despite their dispersion. All his previous nonsense about capitalists and communists, bankers and beggars, fades into unimportance. Hitler will put his handful of Jews upon the sacrificial altar to let their blood and cleanse the German race.

That is Herr Hitler’s Revelation. “Mein Kampf”, illogical, unscientific, history-distorting, barbaric, is also apocalyptical. And Herren Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Streicher become the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Perpetual revolution emerges as the result of all this, since every country on earth will have to be conquered “to protect the German race.” Then it will have risen to its “dominating position in the world”.

Machiavelli, Napoleon and Capone rolled into one, Adolf Hitler appears an ogre imprisoned by his hates, the quintessence of all he describes as detestable. As Dorothy Thompson has said, “Hitler’s is a legend of total corruption and salvation through sin, whereby one becomes the very image of the bogey of one’s fantasy and is thus redeemed.”

An appalling document in morbid psychology, “Mein Kampf” is an insult to the mentality of a 16-year old child. A high-school education suffices to refute its distorted history, unscientific biology, warped logic. Every argument emerges as the confession of a demon bent on perverting reason for his own aggrandizement. Even a new religion must be created so Hitler may become God!

Forewarned is forearmed.

Every American who has read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” has been warned!

Publisher's Foreword

Publisher’s Foreword

This book, Mein Kampf, written in 1925 by an obscure German political prisoner, is a startling, almost miraculous prophecy of present-day history as it is being made by the author, Adolf Hitler.

The reader of Mein Kampf is always amazed at the completeness with which Hitler is carrying out his fantastic aims. It seems incredible that after having set down in writing such brutal, coldly-calculated plans, Hitler is being allowed by his fellow Germans—and by the rest of the world—even to attempt to execute them.

If Hitler’s plans as stated in Mein Kampf are carried out—if he is not stopped—they mean inevitable war, bloodshed, and the destruction of civilization as we know it.

The reader of this strange book is never able to understand how Hitler can sneer at the masses, call them dull, stupid, moronic—and still capture them.

But—usually the individual never quite considers himself a member of the great masses. It is always his near neighbor who is dull, stupid!

Also—wild, rambling Mein Kampf never attracted much attention until Hitler was powerful enough actually to begin carrying out the threats and promises he wrote into his book.

Finally—the German edition of Mein Kampf—which has made Hitler a millionaire through laws making it compulsory that it be read in the Nazi state and that it be presented to all newly wedded couples—was carefully expurgated. So was the British edition—and the French edition. Each country was offered only a specially-prepared edition, None were allowed to know the true Mein Kampf.

The book first appeared in America in an abridged, carefully expurgated edition, in which were omitted certain basic principles and ambitions which it it behooved Hitler to conceal from American eyes.

Millions of copies of Mein Kampf have now been bought and read all over the world, for it has become the most vital and significant political tract of our time. Rival publishers have recently put two unabridged, unexpurgated editions on the American market. They are best sellers. People throughout the United States must wait months for their turn to obtain Mein Kampf from lending libraries.

But Mein Kampf should be read today!

Every living American should know—immediately—exactly what it was that Hitler said back in 1925—for now words are finding expression in acts of aggression, persecution, tyranny!

It is impossible to understand the ever-changing world of today without knowing the most important ideas and plans Hitler wrote down in Mein Kampf.

Yet in the complete edition of Mein Kampf it is a trying, tiresome task to rescue what is coherent thought from the midst of Hitler’s torrent of 270,000 words.

This edition of Mein Kampf contains every important point, every important idea Hitler presented, every important sentence he wrote. Hitler’s inconsistencies, self-contradictions, extremities, even his erratic language—all these are retained here.

But we have eliminated his long-winded digressions, and cut out much of the endless repetition—repetition which he himself explains is necessary in order indelibly to impress an idea upon the mind of everyone exposed to his propaganda.

Sometimes we have expressed in a single sentence a thought which Hitler required two or three pages to present. We have slashed Hitler’s 270,000 words to 70,000.

But nothing important is omitted!

All important portions of the text, expurgated in the original American edition, are presented here.

The reader of our edition will know exactly what Hitler said in Mein Kampf. He will have gained an indispensable background without which it is impossible even to attempt to understand the present world. He will perhaps see a bit more clearly the role he, as an individual, must play in this Hitler-threatened age.

We have criticized, commented upon, and explained the text wherever it was considered necessary.

Chapter 1

By Adolf Hitler

Chapter I

My Home

To-day I consider it fortunate that fate chose Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth. For this little town lies on the border between two German States, the reunion of which we younger ones regard as a task that must be worked for with all our powers.

German-Austrians must return to the great German Fatherland, and not because of economic reasons. No no! Even if economically this union were unimportant—even if it were harmful—it must, nevertheless, still come.

Common Blood Belongs in a Common Reich.

Not until every single German is in one common Reich—and a Reich too crowded to provide bread—will the State have the moral right to acquire foreign soil. At that time, and only at that time, the sword becomes the plow, and bread is watered by the tears of war.

So this little frontier town is to me the symbol of a great task.

(Hitler achieved his ambition to unite Germany and Austria when German troops marched into crushed Vienna in March, 1938. He states here that Germany will have no moral right to seize foreign soil until all Germans are living in a common Reich—but in March, 1939, he took Czechoslovakia, a state inhabited by millions of non-German people.)

My parents, Bavarian by blood and Austrian by nationality, lived here at the end of the 80’s of the last century. Father was a faithful civil servant, and mother kept herself busy with us children.

(Adolf Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schickelgruber, and while in Nazi Germany it is alleged that Alois’ father was Johann Hiedler, the man Maria Anna married five years after the birth of Alois, this cannot be proven. Alois, a drunkard who would face sterilization if he lived in the Germany of today, used the name Schickelgruber until he was 40; then, due to his wife’s insistence that he be legitimized, he legally changed his name to Hitler, a derivation of Hiedler. Adolf was born to Klara Poelzl, third wife of Alois Schickelgruber-Hiedler-Hitler, on April 20, 1889.

(So the racial purist, Adolf Hitler, does not know his own grandfather.)

I remember little of this time, for before I was very old my father had to go down the River Inn to take a post at Passau in the German Reich. Soon after that he was again transferred, this time to Linz. There he was pensioned off, and after a time settled on a farm which he bought near Lambach in Northern Austria.

I did not brood over my future, but I had no sympathy for the life my father had led. I did extremely well in school, and singing lessons in the choir of the Lambach Convent gave me excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the splendor of the rich church festivals. I fixed upon the position of abbot as an ideal to look toward.

My longing to be an abbot disappeared very quickly, however, to make way for things more in accord with my temperament: in my father’s library I found books on military subjects—most important of all, two illustrated volumes telling of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. These I devoured. And this great heroic campaign became my greatest spiritual experience. I was now excited—ever more and more—by everything connected with War and Militarism

Confused, I wondered if there was a difference between the Germans fighting this war and other Germans. Why did not my father and other Austrian-Germans battle in this war against the French?

Do not all we Germans belong together?

This problem racked my brain. I asked questions, and learned with greedy envy that not every German was fortunate enough to belong to the Reich of Bismarck.

I could not understand this.

At this time, my oratorical gift was trained by stirring, violent arguments with comrades: I became a ring-leader. Meanwhile, because of my nature, my father decided attendance at the Humanistic School was useless. He thought a non-classical modern school more suitable. He was impressed by my obvious talent for drawing, and this subject was neglected in the Austrian schools. But he was determined that like himself, I should eventually become a civil servant.

I flatly refused the thought, NO! and again NO! The thought of slaving in an office, not master of my own life, sickened me.

The ridiculously easy studies at school left me so much spare time that the fields and forests saw much of me in those days, and so when my enemies examine my life now, back into childhood, they can ferret out, if they will, the mean tricks this “Hitler” played in his youth in company with other robust boys. I thank Heaven for my happy memories of those times!

By the time I was twelve years old, I had decided I would become a painter. My father knew nothing of this ambition, but suddenly, after I rejected once again his plan for the future, he for the first time asked what I intended to be. I unexpectedly burst out with my decision. My father was speechless:

“A painter? An artist?”

He doubted my sanity, but hoped that he had misunderstood—then he opposed me with all the force of his character:

“An artist—No! Never as long as I live.”

I strengthened my resolve. The old man was embittered, and though I loved him, so was I. He commanded me to drop all thought of ever becoming a painter. I returned that I would no longer study anything else. My threat became action when he tried to impose his authority! I took no notice of my school work. I do not know if this reasoning was correct; but I learned only what I pleased—excelling only in my favorite subjects, geography and especially history.

To-day when I examine this period, I find two outstanding facts:

II. I became a nationalist;

II. I came to understand the significance of history.

Old Austria was a state of nationalities. Few Germans in the Reich had any idea of the constant struggle waged for the sacred German language, and the German life, by the ten million Germans living among forty-two million other people in Austria. Only now, with this misery put upon millions more of our people who dream of the Fatherland while living under foreign yoke, can the meaning of this battle for nationality be widely understood.

Now, perhaps, greater numbers will realize the character of the Germans in Austria, who for centuries preserved the Reich in the East, while the Reich itself was interested in colonies and not in its own lost flesh and blood so near at hand.

As in every struggle, there were three groups in the language battle of Austria:

The fighters, the lukewarms, and the traitors.

Significantly, this war engulfed the school, cradle of the oncoming generations. The fighting is ever chiefly over the child, and the first cry is:

“German boy, do not forget that you are a German!”

“German girl, remember that you are to be a German mother!”

Easily captured, youth in countless ways carried on the guerilla warfare, refusing to sing non-German songs, rebelliously wearing the forbidden emblem of its own German nationality, rejoicing in being punished—even beaten—for this. Youth came to glory in the grandeur of German heroes.

While very young, I, too, joined in this national struggle. My development was quite rapid: even at fifteen I knew the difference between dynastic patriotism to the ruling Hapsburg House of Austria, and the nationalism of the people.

There was really no Austrian history taught in the schools, yet, actually, the very separation into two states, Germany and Austria, was German history.

Probably my entire later life was influenced by my fortune in having at school in Linz an intelligent teacher, Professor Doctor Leopold Pötsch, who knew that history must not be taught merely as a jumble of dates and names. Only the important must be emphasized, the unimportant ignored; this I knew. He utilized our national fanaticism, repeatedly exploiting it. He made history my favorite subject.

Who could possibly study German history under such a teacher without becoming an enemy of the Austrian dynastic state which so disastrously betrayed the true destiny of the nation!

Who could keep allegiance to emperors who sold the cause of the German people for their own petty ends? Austria could not love us as Germans, and thus foreign poisons ate at the German body. Even Vienna became un-German. The House of Hapsburg favored Czechs wherever possible. It was the hand of the Goddess of Eternal Justice, plus implacable revenge, which caused Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the enemy of Austro-Germanism and the patron of Austria’s Slavization, to fall by bullets he himself had prepared.

The burdens which the German people bore were enormous—unimaginable sacrifices in taxes and blood. Most sad and outrageous of all was that all this was morally fostered by the alliance with Germany; and thus Germany herself partly helped along the gradual extermination of the German nationality in Austria. The hypocritical Hapsburgs created the impression abroad that Austria was still a German state.

Blind, the leaders of the Reich saw nothing of all this. Yet the tragic alliance between the new Reich and the old Austrian fake state brought the World War and the general collapse.

In earliest youth I grasped this conviction which ever grew stronger and stronger:

The protection of the German race required the destruction of Austria; further, national feeling is very unlike dynastic patriotism; above all else, the House of Hapsburg was fated to bring misfortune to the German nation.

I thus intensely loved my native German-Austrian country, and bitterly hated the “Austrian” state. I was no lukewarm—I was a fighter! I was a young revolutionary.

I never lost this art of historical thinking, and thus have always possessed a never-drained source of understanding for politics.

At the age of twelve I saw “Wilhelm Tell” and a few months later I saw my first opera. I was captivated. Convinced that I should never be a civil servant, and my talent for drawing now confirmed—appreciated in school—my resolve as to my future was unshakable. Pleas and threats were useless. I would be a painter. Nothing could make an official of me. Meanwhile as time passed I was more and more attracted by architecture, and assuming this to be the broadening of my talent for painting, I was delighted.

I never dreamed the future would turn out so differently.

When I was thirteen my father suddenly died, suffering a stroke which plunged us all in the depths of sadness. My life went on unchanged for a time, but I was determined more than ever. Suddenly an illness rescued me: due to a severe lung trouble the doctor strongly advised my Mother against ever allowing me to work in an office. And I had to stop school for at least a year. So all that I had warred for suddenly became reality. My mother agreed to send me to the Academy.

Then, in two years, my Mother’s death in a flash had ended all my happy plans. Her death was a fearful shock. I had respected my Father but I loved my Mother.

Need and the reality of life now forced me to make a quick decision, Meager funds inherited along with the customary orphan’s pension were not nearly enough for me to live on. I had now to earn my daily bread.

I went to Vienna with little luggage but with iron determination in my heart. I, too, hoped to wrest from fate the victory my Father had won, I, also, would become “something”—but no official.

Chapter 2

Chapter II

Vienna—Years of Study and Struggle

During the last months of my Mother’s life I went to Vienna to take the entrance examination to the Academy. I took along many drawings, convinced that I would easily pass the test.

This was my second visit to Vienna—once when fifteen I had spent two weeks vacation there—and now I was excited again by the magnificent parliament building, and by the Ringstrasse which was to me like a fairy tale of the Arabian Nights.

Proud and confident I awaited the result of the entrance examination: then announcement of my failure struck me like a bolt from the blue. The director told me my drawings showed lack of ability to paint, but that I obviously belonged in the school of architecture.

For the first time in my life I was dissatisfied with myself, but in a few days I knew I would one day be an architect.

After my Mother’s death I went to Vienna again, for a third time, now to remain for many years; once again I was calm and confident—my goal burned before my eyes. No obstacles could prevent me from becoming an architect.

Now I look upon what I had once considered the cruelty of fate as the wisdom of providence. The Goddess of Misery threatened to crush me in her arms, but the will to resist grew, and this will was finally victorious. I owe it to this that I learned to be hard, and that now I am able to be hard. I rejoice that the Goddess of Misery became my new mother, pitching me into the world of poverty—so making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.

Vienna still awakens only sad thoughts in my brain. The city means to me five years of sorrow and wretchedness. For five years I struggled for bread—and sometimes went hungry—first as a worker, then as a small painter.