05-07-2025
Mein Kampf at 100 — why the most reviled book in history still haunts us
Nuremberg, January 8, 1946. The British prosecutor Frederick Elwyn Jones opened the case against the 21 senior Nazis in the dock, charged with crimes against humanity. Eight months earlier Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker; others close to him were dead or had absconded. It was vital that justice was seen to be done.
There was no shortage of evidence of the Holocaust, of the slaughters of the Eastern Front and other war crimes. But one item had particular resonance. 'May it please the tribunal,' Jones said, 'it is now my duty to draw to the tribunal's attention a document which became the statement of faith of these defendants.'
Mein Kampf is 100 years old this month. The centenary will reinforce Germans' determination to keep the odious book buried. But I recently set myself the task of understanding it better, to see what lessons it provides — not just for Germany, but for all countries.
It was not a straightforward assignment. My Jewish father escaped Czechoslovakia by the skin of his teeth in the summer of 1939. Several members of his extended family were killed in the camps. He rarely spoke of his ordeal, and I never got to ask him about my strange surname.
I had never read Mein Kampf. Almost nobody has, or says they have, although everyone knows the title. It took nerves of steel to plough through the 700-page tome, which is what I did, 30 pages a night, in German and then in English. My research also required some subterfuge, using the term 'MK' in emails to spare my interviewees any embarrassment.
Hitler originally wanted to call his book Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice but was persuaded to make it shorter. It is both a carefully crafted biography (riddled with inventions and falsifications) and a job application.
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The Germany of the 1920s was deeply unstable. Defeat in the First World War had changed everything. The Kaiserreich was no more, the army had been emasculated, the economy was in ruins. The new Weimar Republic, with its fragile parliamentary democracy, was for Hitler and his supporters a byword for weakness and decadence.
In 1923 Hitler led the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When it failed he was sent to jail, but given a light sentence and a large, comfortable cell. Landsberg prison may have been called a fortress, but for its most celebrated inmate it was more a political meeting room.
'Hitler made an announcement in a newspaper. He asked all his friends and politicians not to visit him any more,' says the German historian Othmar Plöckinger, author of a landmark study of Mein Kampf. 'He wanted now to start seriously writing his book.' He needed a manifesto to propel him on to the fragmented political scene.
As well as repulsive, it is a curious book. It could have done with some serious editing. Much of the time the writing is repetitive and barely coherent. Sometimes Hitler veers into strange tangents on the Habsburg or Japanese empires. Some passages are moderately rational, but all too often the author can't help himself. There are 467 mentions of the word Jew or its derivations, 64 mentions of poison, 14 of parasite, 27 of disease and 167 of blood.
Along with history, Hitler's main themes are sociology and a horrifically distorted understanding of biology. He borrows ideas from late-19th and early 20th-century ideologues such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-French-German philosopher who propagated theories of ethno-nationalism and racial superiority that were standard at the time. Others, such as the political scientist Carl Schmitt, focused on the acquisition of power. Some ideas were copied; others, such as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution , were traduced to fit his agenda.
Hitler saw the fate of people as being driven by the law of racial struggle; the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker. '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 etc.' There are pages and pages of this stuff on racial purity, eugenics and the urgent need for Germans to acquire space to live, Lebensraum.
For Hitler, Aryan supremacy was evident in all walks of life, from biology to high art. 'Everything we admire on this earth today — science and art, technology and inventions — is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.'
He found many groups responsible for the humiliation of the German people, the Treaty of Versailles, the 'stab in the back'. He blamed the communists, the media, the liberal elite, homosexuals and the French.
But he blamed one group in particular. 'Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word 'Jew' first gave me ground for special thoughts. For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an antisemite.' There is worse, much worse, but I won't put readers through it.
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Volume one was published in July 1925. The first print run of 10,000 sold out within months. But sales quickly tailed off and the second volume, released a year later, fared much worse. Reviews ranged from supportive to outraged to dismissive. Cultured Germany wouldn't be taken in by such ramblings, was the prevailing response.
But sales picked up again as Hitler closed in on power. After 1933 it was deemed patriotic to own a copy. Local councils were instructed to distribute it to married couples. As war loomed, soldiers were handed pocket versions; it became not so much something to read as a devotional object.
Hitler received the royalties, and according to a 1939 article in Time magazine, the Führer had amassed more than $3 million (the equivalent of about $70 million today) from German sales alone.
Versions in English and other languages tended to tighten up and sanitise the message. President Roosevelt — who came to power just a month after Hitler, and was fluent in German — scribbled this in his abridged 1933 translation: 'This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.'
On Germany's surrender, Hitler's assets were confiscated. The postwar authorities and the western Allies faced two competing priorities — de-Nazification and building democracy, in which freedom of expression was central. They came up with the ingenious idea of using copyright law: for the next 70 years it would be illegal to publish new versions of Mein Kampf in Germany, although it remained available around the world.
It took much longer than non-Germans realise for Germany to reckon with its history. It wasn't until the late 1960s that a new generation started to confront their parents. Alongside discussion forums and TV talk shows, a new theatrical genre emerged. One of the first to deal directly with Mein Kampf was Helmut Qualtinger, an Austrian actor who read out excerpts on stage.
In the 1990s a Turkish-born German comedian called Serdar Somuncu used ridicule and satire in a show called The Legacy of a Mass Murderer. Yasemin Yildiz, a cultural historian, describes the atmosphere: 'People were laughing out loud. He enabled them to have this bodily release through humour, which aimed to make Hitler smaller. A lot of the postwar period [had] dealt with this anxiety around him by making him demonic.'
As for the book, many copies continued to sit in people's homes — sometimes stashed away in attics or cellars, coming to light only when the war generation passed on and their children or grandchildren went through their belongings.
When the copyright ran out in 2015, a decision was taken to republish Mein Kampf, officially, under the watchful eye of experts at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Their task would be to produce a critical edition, inserting notes on every page, detailing distortions, falsehoods and the ensuing horrors. It triggered an impassioned public debate, including within Germany's Jewish community. There was a flurry of sales in the first year or so of publication, largely to scholars or curious members of the public, but that didn't last.
Job done? Not at all. You can find the book in shops, if you look hard enough, and more easily online, both the sanitised version and the original. But that, in my view, is the least of the problem.
What I have found, during months of interviews and research, is that the messages contained in Mein Kampf have not gone away. They can be found all over the world on the internet; on YouTube and elsewhere bloggers, vloggers and agitators borrow the themes of the 1920s and 1930s.
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They do not usually cite Mein Kampf directly. Perhaps they think it will taint them. Perhaps they think it's no longer relevant or cool. But its ideas have moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Comparing passages with speeches by leading American and European politicians, who talk of 'ethnic replacement' and 'poisoning the blood', there is a similar focus on grievance, resentment and encirclement. This includes speeches and social posts from Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump.
During a campaign rally in December 2023, the man who is now US president said: 'They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're destroying our country. They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, 'Oh Hitler said that, in a much different way.'' There is more like it. Chapter two, volume two of Mein Kampf, titled The State, says: 'The poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people … have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.'
I know this is deeply contentious territory. I am fully aware that anyone cross-referencing modern-day populism with the 1920s and 1930s lays themselves open to being denounced as simplistic or plain wrong. No two political movements or historic moments are exactly alike. I am not trying to say that today's leaders will follow Hitler. Words don't inevitably lead to actions.
But what I am saying is that, for all the efforts to eradicate this book's ideas, some of them have returned into the heart of global politics.
Banning the spirit of Mein Kampf has turned out to be harder than anyone realised. Just as Hitler recycled existing material, so his book is being refashioned for our times. It's part of a continuum. His ideas have always been there, and they have never gone away.
Archive on 4: 100 Years of Mein Kampf is on BBC Radio 4, Jul 5 at 8pm and then on BBC Sounds
