CHAPTER NINETEEN

‘If fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas …’

Incarcerated in Landsberg Prison, 40 miles (65 km) west of Munich, Hitler was able to rest and reflect. He enjoyed all the creature comforts of home. His cell was more like a drawing room, nicely furnished, with a relaxing view of the countryside. Surrounded by fellow Nazi inmates, he formed and led a discussion group in the low-security fortress. As well as Hess, they included the Kampfbund leader Hermann Kriebel; Friedrich Weber, leader of the Bund Oberland (another of the Kampfbund groups); the SA leader Emil Maurice, and members of the Stosstrupp, Hitler’s bodyguard unit.

The prison officials looked kindly on Hitler’s ‘special needs’, exempting him from labour details and allowing the chief Nazi to dress in lederhosen, stroll in the fortress grounds and dine – from a vegetarian menu, if he chose – under a swastika banner.¹ Hitler was permitted many visitors – politicians, fans, society ladies, soldiers, lawyers, clergymen, aristocrats and workers – who sat by their idol, sometimes for up to six hours a day, the maximum allowed per week for ordinary inmates. At least five visitors a day came to his room in April and May 1924, and more than 330 during his entire ‘stay’.² The most famous were Ludendorff, Rosenberg, Amann, Streicher, the piano heiress Helene Bechstein, the socialite Elsa Bruckmann and Hitler’s half-niece Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal.

In Landsberg, Hitler enjoyed the respect and deference accorded a Mafia boss. His comrades basked in the reflected glory of sharing their prison terms with their leader, on whom they lavished attention. On ‘comradeship evenings’, a military band struck up when Hitler entered the common room, his worshippers standing to attention behind their chairs until he reached his place. Outside the guards would assemble to hear their famous prisoner speak. The cult of the Führer was taking shape in the most unlikely place.

Hitler eschewed exercise and sport, making him one of the few prisoners who gained weight. His excuse offered a glimpse of his self-image at this time, that of the brooding dictator-in-waiting. ‘A Führer can’t afford to be beaten by his followers, even at gymnastics or games,’ he solemnly explained.³

His decision later to adopt a vegetarian diet has been attributed to his weight gain in prison.⁴ He began to eat less meat in Landsberg, because ‘meat and alcohol harm my body’, he told his friend Hanfstaengl. He had therefore ‘decided to summon the will-power necessary to do without both, as much as I enjoy them.’⁵ At other times, he explained that he chose a vegetarian diet because meat made him ‘sweat tremendously’ during his speeches.⁶ (In coming years the vegetarian teetotaller would cut a lonely figure at the tables of the rich and powerful, heavy with joints of beef, legs of lamb and bottles of wine. At times, he was known to refer scornfully to his carnivorous companions as ‘cadaver eaters’.)

In prison, with much spare time, Hitler sat and read, continuing his ‘self-education’. The guards delivered whatever books he requested; ‘Landsberg was my state-paid university,’ he later remarked.⁷ In the comfort of his room, deep in his books, he drew on new reserves of self-knowledge, he claimed: ‘the level of confidence, optimism and faith that could no longer be shaken by anything’.⁸ Rudolf Hess was utterly persuaded. In his eyes, Hitler grew in stature in Landsberg. To Hess, he became the saviour of Germany, with ‘faith enough to move mountains’.⁹

On his thirty-fifth birthday, 20 April, Hitler received hundreds of gifts and letters from well-wishers and devoted fans. One came from a PhD graduate in philology who, agog with admiration, ascribed to his newfound hero a famous quote by Goethe: ‘To you a god has given the tongue with which to express our suffering’.¹⁰ The correspondent’s name was Joseph Goebbels.

 

Adjusting to the title of ‘Führer vom Volk’ (‘Ruler of the People’), to which the putsch had raised him, Hitler felt moved to write the story of his life. On 7 July 1924, he announced his decision to step down from the leadership of the (then banned) NSDAP in order to commit himself to this autobiographical work.

His timing was auspicious: in his absence, the party had fallen apart, riven with internal disputes and petty power struggles that underlined the Nazis’ reliance on the Führer. These intimations of his indispensability fired Hitler’s ego and emboldened him to write more than a memoir: this would be a political and racial manifesto.

Hitler seized the time afforded by his prison sentence: he shut himself away, refusing to see all but essential visitors, and dedicated himself to the story of his life and the rise of the National Socialist movement. He dictated the draft to Hess, who, with Emil Maurice’s help, transcribed and polished it, then Hitler helped to type the final version. No idle amanuensis, Hess probed and primed the Führer all the way.

In Mein Kampf (My Struggle) we encounter the core text of the Nazi Party’s ideology and Hitler’s full-blown Weltanschauung (philosophy of life). Many have branded the book bombastic, banal, derivative and pretentious. In parts, it is all these things. It is also often tediously repetitive and grindingly dull. To read Mein Kampf is to subject your brain to an incessant verbal hammering: ‘Submit to my will or die!’ Hitler’s sentences shout.

There is no denying that the book has flashes of clarity, even lyrical beauty; yet for the most part Hitler’s ‘autobiography’ is a document of savage banality, striking for its dearth of human decency and any sense of humour.

The Führer would typically start a passage in a portentous, pseudo-academic voice and soon lose himself in a welter of denunciations, rank prejudice and the usual vitriol, against the Jews, Marxists or whoever happened to enrage him, as if goaded by some malign troll sitting on his shoulder. Readers hoping for a powerful argument, or simply common sense, came away shaking their heads with disappointment. Many found it difficult to take seriously a man who could write of ‘the hissing of the Jewish world-hydra’ and the coming of the ‘Jewish world dictatorship’.¹¹

Hitler often resorted to ludicrous neologisms – the ‘Jewification of our spiritual life’, the ‘mammonization of our mating instinct’, etc. To call this stuff ‘paranoid’ would be to dignify sheer silliness as a medical condition. Even his Nazi editors silently despaired of their Führer’s draft, written in the sneering tone of an embittered man who refused to accept criticism or instruction (just as Hitler the schoolboy had done). According to one psycho-historian, Mein Kampf is redolent of a mind under siege, its author an adolescent who refused ‘to surrender to the domineering father and insisted on protecting the loving mother’.¹² While this may sound like psychobabble, the theme of the heroic son defending his mother from a brute resonated in the psyche of the ‘beaten underdog’ that characterized post-war Germany.

In the final analysis, Mein Kampf is simply, astonishingly vicious. A ‘curiously nasty, obscene odour’ emanates from its pages, observed Joachim Fest. It was the stench of the author’s memory of poverty, war, bloodshed and death, preying on a mind disgusted by ‘the images of puberty: copulation, sodomy, perversion, rape, contamination of the blood.’¹³

And that is why so many liberals and left-wingers dismissed Hitler as a bad joke, a violent criminal whose time was up, a marginal player who hadn’t a hope of gaining power. They misread the national mood and Hitler’s will. Which is to say, they misread Mein Kampf.

What of its ‘content’? Mein Kampf was conceived as a personal and political manifesto. Much more than this, it maps a path to power; prophesies the rise of the Thousand Year Reich; describes the racial composition of ‘Aryan’ Germany; prefigures the seizure of Lebensraum, ‘living space’, to the east; and outlines a vision of the Fatherland led by a strong and powerful leader, a veritable superman (of whose identity no German reader was left in any doubt). And it prescribes, with awful precision, the punishment that awaited the Jewish people once the National Socialist movement had seized power.

In Mein Kampf Hitler synthesized, consciously or unconsciously, a multitude of sources: the ruminations of pseudo-academics, the ramblings of ‘racial theorists’, and the decontextualized lines of a few brilliant minds. Much is derived from other works without attribution or care for their authors’ intent or context.

Among Hitler’s chief influences were: the nineteenth-century French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau’s theory of the Aryan Master Race; journalist Wilhelm Marr’s pamphlet ‘The Victory of Judaism over Germanism’, which blamed ‘Jewish financiers’ for the crash of 1873; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), the fabricated conspiracy theory of world Jewish domination; the nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke’s vision of a German colonial superpower from which the Jews would be excluded; the works of the English ‘racialist philosopher’ Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who posited that the Jews were a ‘race’, not a religion, so regardless of whether they converted to Christianity they were still ‘Jews’ (a distinction the Nazis would later use to condemn converts to the gas chamber); General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s military theories, chiefly drawn from his book Germany and the Next War (1911), which ennobled war as a ‘divine business’ and a ‘biological necessity’; Martin Luther’s polemical outburst, The Jews and Their Lies (1543); Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the ‘Superman’, the hyper-evolved ‘great man’ of the future; and Arthur Schopenhauer’s classic work, The World as Will and Representation (1818–19). Hitler took Schopenhauer’s remark ‘The Jew is the great master of lying’¹⁴ out of context and gave it an odd, folksy twist: ‘His mode of life,’ Hitler wrote, ‘compels the Jew to lie, and to lie always, just as the Northern man is compelled to look for warm clothing.’¹⁵

These influences and sources mingled with Hitler’s personal experiences, which he weaves through the book: his life in pre-war Vienna and Munich; the lessons of Lueger and Schönerer and the Pan-Germans; his poverty and rejection as an artist; the love of his mother and his fear of his father; all the way back to his childhood memories of Wagner, and of Karl May’s stories of the Old West.

Yet the most pervasive influence on Mein Kampf, which hangs over everything like a dark cloud, was his memory of the Western Front: the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ at Ypres; the battles of the Somme and Flanders; his disgust with Versailles and the ‘November Criminals’; his ache for vengeance against the back-stabbers; and, above all, his murderous hatred of those he held responsible – the Jews.

All this culminated in his ideology of the Master Race, ruled by the archetypal Nazi superman – the blonde, blue-eyed beast who would prosecute a divinely inspired war of revenge against those who had perpetrated the humiliation of 1918. Under this programme the Third Reich would reconquer Europe, enslave its people, occupy Russia and the East, rid the occupied lands of Jews and other despised minorities, and rule for a thousand years.

 

Propaganda would be crucial to the success of the Nazi programme, Hitler had always insisted, so he devoted a chapter of Mein Kampf to the dark arts of mass indoctrination. His recipe for winning over the masses would rely on their ignorance and gullibility: he portrays the people as little more than useful idiots, on whose support he temporarily relied for his rise to power: ‘The receptivity of large masses is very limited. Their capacity to understand things is slight whereas their forgetfulness is great. Given this, effective propaganda must restrict itself to a handful of points, which it repeats as slogans as long as it takes for the dumbest member of the audience to get an idea of what they mean.’¹⁶

Equating political power with the dominating of women, he continued:

The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted or weak. Like a woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander …

They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization and the hidden abuse of their human freedom … All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they will always submit in the end … Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.¹⁷

In other words, where propaganda fell short, the state would use brute force and the will of a ‘strong man’ to persuade the people.

 

Mein Kampf defines the ‘philosophy’ of Nazism chiefly by what Hitler despised. What he despised started and ended with ‘the Jew’, those ‘parasites’ and ‘leeches’, he variously wrote, who were responsible for the evils of the world.¹⁸ In Mein Kampf we encounter the full-blown, violent strain of his anti-Semitism, a visceral hatred of the Jewish people that would accompany him for the rest of his life and riddle every corner of his coming rule. We have seen his paranoia grow by increments. Now Mein Kampf confirmed its vast reach. In Hitler’s mind, Judaism, Marxism and international capital had merged into a monolithic traitorous and poisonous alliance against the German people.

According to this reading, ‘the Jew’ was at once ‘a cowardly Pacifist’, ‘a vicious warmonger’, a ‘scheming wheedler of the proletariat’ and ‘an overstuffed plutocrat’, concludes one assessment.¹⁹ The Jews should have been rooted out and destroyed long ago, Hitler wrote: ‘All the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence.’²⁰

‘Judeophobia’ more accurately described Hitler’s ceaseless, all-consuming obsession with the Jews, observes one historian.²¹ If so, his ‘phobia’ had been brewing for years, as we’ve seen, from the streets of Vienna, to the war-torn cities of post-war Germany, to the beer halls of Munich. Its full, murderous form now lashed out against a group of people with nothing in common except their religion, on whom Hitler now heaped not only the responsibility for Germany’s defeat, economic collapse and artistic ‘decadence’, but also the miseries and failures of his own life.

He had often in the past attacked the exponents of Modernism, in dance, theatre, design, cinema and cabaret, as well as physicists, philosophers and psychologists who peddled ‘unGerman’ ideas, as a Jewish cabal. They included, at various times, Otto Dix, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Thomas Mann, Max Reinhardt, Ernst Toller, Herbert Marcuse. Not all were Jews, though Jews were prominently represented in German culture. And now, noting their prevalence, Hitler compared their influence to a kind of contagious disease, an epidemic, writing in Mein Kampf:

In my eyes, the charge against Judaism became a grave one the moment I discovered the Jewish activities in the Press, in art, in literature and the theatre … One needed only to look at the posters announcing hideous productions of the cinema and theatre, and study the names of the authors who were highly lauded there to become permanently adamant on Jewish questions. Here was a pestilence, a moral pestilence, with which the public was being infected. It was worse than the Black Plague of long ago.²²

His mind was now set on a course that led inexorably to the destruction of an entire people whom he regarded as an existential threat to Germany, as Mein Kampf reveals: ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.’²³

Yet the racial bludgeoning of the Jews was also popular and opportune, as Hitler’s keen political antennae had detected. By blaming the Jews for all of Germany’s miseries, he ‘directed the frustrated rage of the German people against a convenient and defenceless victim’.²⁴ In fomenting a monolithic Jewish conspiracy, Hitler’s paranoia was in full accord with the populist will and his own political plans.

In this context, the Führer’s views on ‘leadership’ carry the darkest intent:

The art of leadership consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category …²⁵

A lesser known source for the hate-filled language against the Jews in Mein Kampf was the work of the leader of the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483–1546). Hitler revered Luther as one of the greatest Germans, along with Frederick the Great and Bismarck, and when he branded the Jews ‘vermin’, ‘liars’, ‘vipers’, ‘belly worms’ who were ‘devouring the nation’s body’, Hitler was taking his cue from the great theologian. This lexicon is traceable to Luther’s 65,000-word denunciation of the Jewish people, The Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543.²⁶

To put this in context, and in fairness to the fiery priest from Wittenberg, Luther was not an ‘anti-Semite’ or ‘racist’ in the modern or Hitlerian sense, of course. As a younger man, Luther had preached tolerance and kindness towards the Jews, for instance in his essay of 1523, ‘That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew’.²⁷ He turned violently against the Jewish people late in life, when he was very ill, on religious, not racial or political grounds, for their persistent and, to him, dumbfounding refusal to convert to Christianity and follow Christ’s teaching. This he deemed the act of a devil-led people, and in the last few years of his life Luther savagely attacked them in print.

The Jews and Their Lies calls for the burning of Jewish schools and synagogues, the destruction of Jewish homes and the confiscation of their money. Those ‘poisonous envenomed worms’, Luther wrote, should be enslaved or exiled. Mein Kampf echoes that verdict: ‘the Jew’ must be expelled from Germany. Luther even helped the local authorities drive the Jews from their Saxon villages, an act the Nazis would repeat on Kristallnacht in 1938. In a final rage at their recalcitrance, Luther damned the ‘Chosen People’ as ‘the Devil’s People’ and the ‘antiChrist’, concluding: ‘We are at fault in not slaying them’²⁸ – words that haunt Mein Kampf and gave the Nazis a religious authority for the Final Solution.

Hatred, political opportunism and a sixteenth-century theological authority do not alone explain Hitler’s singling out of the Jews for persecution and destruction. Another motive overpowered the rest: race, as he explained in Mein Kampf. The Jews were ‘racially inferior’, a category into which he bundled anyone whose ‘race’ failed to conform to his Nordic, or Aryan, ideal.

There is nothing new in the idea of breeding a Master Race; it has been around since Plato suggested the stronger citizens of Athens should reproduce the ‘Guardians’ of his idealized Republic. In Mein Kampf, Hitler took the idea to its terrifying conclusion. According to his ‘biological race theory’, human ‘races’ were condemned to fight it out until the ‘fittest’ won – a notion as demented as it was widely accepted at the time.²⁹ ‘Man must kill,’ he concluded: ‘Whoever wants to live must fight, and whoever does not want to fight,’ he wrote, ‘does not deserve to live.’³⁰ He repeated this message many times, telling a crowd at Essen on 22 November 1926: ‘Only force rules. Force is the first law.’³¹

In a world of masters and slaves, the weak, the sick, the defenceless were not only doomed; they deserved to die, Hitler continued. This outcome was not only scientifically determined, it was the will of God, he insisted. In a speech that expanded on Mein Kampf, he later declared that ‘the stronger has the right before God and the world to enforce his will.’³²

In this light, the Jews, more than any other ‘race’, posed a unique menace to Hitler’s vision of Aryan rule. He feared the Jews as much as he hated them. He saw ‘Jews here and Jews there and Jews everywhere’. If allowed to procreate, they would realize ‘the Pan-Jewish prophecy that the Jews will one day devour the other nations and become lords of the earth.’³³

Despite their tiny numbers – the Jews made up less than 1 per cent of the German population when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933³⁴ – the Führer would always insist, to the dismay of his less monomaniacal followers, that he would make the removal and destruction of Jewry the party’s chief priority. Mein Kampf is explicit about this.³⁵

 

Mein Kampf contains a litany of errors and fabrications. We haven’t the space to correct them all, but it is worth drawing attention to a few basic flaws given the programme of genocidal murder the book inspired.

Drawing on his favourite ‘racial theorists’ – chiefly Rosenberg, de Gobineau and Chamberlain – Hitler argues that the ‘human race’ contained several subsidiary ‘races’, such as Aryan, Teuton, Anglo-Saxon, African, Asian, Slav, Jew and so on. Whether they liked it or not, these ‘sub-races’ were doomed to an eternal life-or-death struggle for survival.

He explicitly opposed breeding between them (and would ban it as Führer), in case the ‘weak races’ poisoned the genetic purity of the ‘strong’. In making this case in Mein Kampf, he offers a list of ‘successful’ examples of pure-bred creatures from the animal kingdom: ‘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 …’³⁶ The lesson being that the Aryan (or ‘wolf’, to extend the analogy) should breed only with the Aryan, and never with the Jew or Slav (the birds and mice of the analogy). ‘There is no cat,’ Hitler goes on to explain, ‘with a friendly inclination towards mice.’

It is worth restating a biological fact known to most schoolchildren, and which Hitler and his racial theorists had overlooked (as have the neo-white supremacists of our own time): there is only one human race. It is a species called Homo sapiens, to which all human beings belong, and have done for almost 300,000 years (according to fossils recently discovered in Morocco³⁷), regardless of their appearance, religious belief or skin colour, which are the long-term differences arising from environment, climate and culture.

The fittingly Nordic botanist Carl Linnaeus first coined the name Homo sapiens in 1758 to describe the only extant human species, to distinguish us from six extinct species of hominids, such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals). Sapiens is a member of the taxonomic genus Homo, itself part of the family Hominidae, itself part of the order of primates. (For a recent history of the only extant human species, see Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by an Israeli historian, the fittingly Jewish Yuval Noah Harari.³⁸) The finch family, on the other hand, to extrapolate Hitler’s comparison, contains no fewer than 218 species, and the stork more than a dozen. Whether these species inter-breed, Hitler doesn’t make clear.

Nor does he discuss the existential struggle for survival between Homo sapiens and rival species within Hominidae, which include three other genera of great apes. Their continuing existence leads us to the awkward conclusion that a scientifically accurate Nazi race law would have banned interbreeding between Homo sapiens and gorillas, and sent chimps and macaques to the death camps.

In other words, being members of the human ‘race’, ‘racists’ un wittingly attack themselves and their own species when they attack other humans, of different skin colour or culture. The simple truth is: we’re all Homo sapiens and we’re all in this mess together.

Another basic error in Mein Kampf arises from Hitler’s use of the term ‘Aryan’. It appears forty-nine times in the Mannheim translation (and fifty-eight times in the Nazi-approved translation), with reference to the Master Race that would emerge from the Nazis’ ‘Aryanization’ of Germany – that is, the extermination of ‘lesser races’, homosexuals and the disabled.

Though their provenance is unclear, the ‘Aryans’ appear to have been a nomadic Indo-Iranian people who spread over northern India between 1500 and 500 BC and worshipped Vedic deities. ‘Aryan’ loosely defined their shared language and religious beliefs, not their ‘race’. In sum, the blonde, white supermen and -women of the Nazi imagination were modelled on a ‘race’ that never existed; and the Vedic Indo-Iranians from which the word ‘Aryan’ derives were as far removed as can be imagined from Hitler’s pot-bellied Brownshirts.

The perversion of the term exemplifies the destructive power of words when repeatedly harnessed to bogus ideas through official propaganda. Hitler popularized the ‘Aryan ideal’ in speech after speech to ordinary beer-swilling Germans, who were delighted to find themselves anointed the torch-bearers of human civilization. To a packed Munich beer hall on 2 April 1927, he would announce:

We see before us the Aryan race which is manifestly the bearer of all culture, the true representative of all humanity … Our entire industrial science is without exception the work of the Nordics. All great composers from Beethoven to Richard Wagner are Aryans, even though they were born in Italy or France. Do not say that art is international. The tango, the shimmy and the jazz band are international but they are not art. Man owes everything that is of importance to the principle of struggle and to one race … Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of the apes …³⁹

In the murderous sweep of his mind, Hitler had not forgotten homosexuals, transgender, Roma, Sinti, the disabled, chronically sick and mentally ill, who were deemed similarly flawed, genetically inferior, racial weaklings who served no useful purpose. All should be prevented from breeding with healthy German stock, he believed. In power, the Nazis would dispatch tens of thousands of these people to the death camps, along with the Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’.⁴⁰

 

Hanging over Mein Kampf is the memory of the episode by which Hitler measured everything else in his life: his recollections of the First World War. The passage of time had not diminished his fury. The ‘great injustice’ of the Armistice, the stab in the back of the army, super-charged his titanic grudge against the Jewish people who, he claimed, had ‘perpetrated’ Germany’s humiliation.

This monstrous delusion poisoned everything Hitler said and wrote in the book. In a passage of staggering self-deception, he persuaded himself that ‘Jewish treachery’ had killed the German Army, and that Germany might have won the war had these ‘traitors’ been slaughtered in 1914:

If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans …⁴¹

Hitler thus prefigured, as early as 1924, how he would try to destroy the Jewish people: with a far more lethal variety of gas than the mustard gas that had left him temporarily blinded in Pasewalk. Henceforth, he would dedicate his life to the destruction of a ‘race’ whose ‘guilt’ and ‘crimes’ he conflated with the mounds of German corpses on the Western Front. He also alluded to the purpose and scale of a coming Holocaust. The first job of the Nazi Party, he wrote, must be ‘to wipe out the Jewish state’.⁴² The Nazis would survive only through ‘a vast plan of extermination’ of the exponents of rival ‘ideas’ and beliefs.⁴³

Almost a decade before the German people elected Hitler their chancellor, the world had been warned. Nobody who bothered to read his book should have been surprised or shocked by what followed. In Mein Kampf Hitler laid bare the Nazi programme of conquest, persecution and genocide.

The first volume of Mein Kampf appeared on 18 July 1925, seven months after Hitler’s release from Landsberg Prison. He had initially titled it Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, but his publisher, Max Amann, fearing readers would shun such a lugubrious title, recommended the shorter one.

Mein Kampf would sell 10,000 copies by the year’s end, after which sales flagged. Hitler was still, after all, a minor politician and ex-prisoner, despite his international fame as the leader of the Beer Hall Putsch. It would take the revival of his political fortunes, in 1930, to interest readers in his book. By the end of 1932, sales would reach almost 230,000; and by 1944, 12.5 million copies had been printed, obligatory reading in schools and among Nazi Party members. Mein Kampf would make Hitler a wealthy man a year before Germany lost the war and he killed himself.

On first publication it received ‘mixed’ reviews, if it was reviewed at all, outside Germany. Some readers drew the right conclusions about it. One was the British historian Sir Charles Grant Robertson, who had read the book and heard Hitler speak. In 1936 Robertson reflected:

No one can read Mein Kampf without amazement at the shallowness of its ‘philosophy’, the travesty and superficiality of its historical interpretation of the past, or the demagogic crudity of its anti-semitic appeal to all the basest and fiercest of human motives – fear, jealousy, greed – and above all to the most invincible of all national passions – the purging of defeat by the expulsion of a national scape-goat on whom the misery of an innocent people, deceived into sin, can safely be put.⁴⁴

On 19 December 1924, Hitler stepped out of prison to relaunch his political career. If the beast had been ‘tamed’ in prison, as the New York Times wishfully reported at the time,⁴⁵ Hitler showed no such restraint on his first public appearance, in the Bürgerbräukeller, the scene of the Putsch. He took the stage as a newly minted ‘democrat’, apparently willing to campaign peacefully for power. But nothing else had changed: he began his speech by branding the Jewish people the tools of the devil who must be eliminated from the earth.

One man taking a very close interest in Hitler’s career at this time was the student who had written to him in prison, Dr Joseph Goebbels. To Goebbels, Hitler was Germany’s only hope, the saviour of the country, the God-sent ‘sweet’ messiah and ‘coming dictator’, as he wrote on 20 November 1925.⁴⁶ In his diary in June the following year, Goebbels relished the prospect of working with him: ‘One could conquer the world with this man.’⁴⁷

The Führer was ready to start.