Author: Adolph Hitler – – Translator: Michael Ford
Translated in 2009
Overall Rating (1-10): 8 (rating the translation, not the book)
Approximate Reading Time: 15 to 20 hours
Hitler wrote Book I of Mein Kampf in 1924, while in German prison, for attempting to overthrow the government. This event is known as “The Beerhouse Putz”. It is amazing that he was not executed. He appeared so inept they just locked him up for a few years.
He was instead given unusually lenient treatment. He was imprisoned alongside his principal accomplice, Rudolph Hess, who served as his secretary during the writing of Mein Kamph. Hitler dictated the work to Hess, who would later become Deputy Furher under Hitler.
The following summary analysis of Mein Kampf is presented verbatim from Wikipedia, not only to introduce the topic but to post a warning to you that this is a very superficial summary, as Hitler was a far deeper thinker than given credit there. Also, it is out of date as their article does not even mention the new Michael Ford translation, which is exceedingly superior to all previous translations because of his in-depth study of both Hitler’s motives and the German language nuances. Further, Ford involved a number of scholarly reviewers in the translation work and every word was carefully reviewed by experts.
I have previously read this work in an earlier translation and it was almost unfathomable at points, because the translator apparently had a poor grasp of the subject and was doing a rote translation, missing many of the language nuances. Also, Hitler “edited” the work as time went by and this translation corrects the changes and puts it back in its original 1924 form.
Hitler, like a lot of narcissists, wanted the view of him to be “best” so he was editing it to match accomplishments as they occurred.
The WIKIPEDIA SUMMARY:
In Mein Kampf, Hitler used the main thesis of “the Jewish peril”, which posits a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership.[7] The narrative describes the process by which he became increasingly anti-Semitic and militaristic, especially during his years in Vienna. He speaks of not having met a Jew until he arrived in Vienna, and that at first his attitude was liberal and tolerant. When he first encountered the anti-Semitic press, he says, he dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. Later he accepted the same anti-Semitic views, which became crucial in his program of national reconstruction of Germany.
Mein Kampf has also been studied as a work on political theory. For example, Hitler announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils: Communism and Judaism.
During his work, Hitler blamed Germany’s chief woes on the parliament of the Weimar Republic, the Jews, and Social Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish interests.[8] (emphasis added) He announced that he wanted to completely destroy the parliamentary system, believing it to be corrupt in principle, as those who reach power are inherent opportunists.
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Note: the following paragraphs that set the stage for my review are not from Mein Kamph but are from my fairly extensive knowledge of both WWI and WWII obtained over the years from many other sources.
The reason I added the emphasis above is that it is not clear from “Mein Kampf” or Wiki, that Hitler believed the emphasized sentence above was critical to his entire purpose. Simply put, Hitler and many other Germans, felt that World War I was ended very abruptly by “these people” after they overthrew Kaiser (King) Wilhelm. They had good reasons to believe this.
First, it was very sudden that the war ended, from the standpoint, of the troops in the field. And Hitler was in the field at the time. It was a mere two days from the abdication of the Kaiser to the cease fire and surrender. So, a new government “capitulated in two days” from the view of the field officers and soldiers.
Second, Germany was the occupier when WW I ended of all the lands that were occupied in Europe. They were advanced well into France, Poland, Russia and other points. Not one foreign soldier was on German soil, nor had they been at any time during the war.
Third, the propaganda machine of the Wilhelm regime was so effective during the war that virtually everyone in Germany including most of the military, thought they were clearly winning the war.
The truth was that their troops had become isolated and virtually trapped and the civilian population was on the brink of starving. The new parliament saw no alternative but to surrender as they no longer had the resources to fight on.
Hitler was a mid-level soldier in the German Army during the war. He was well-respected and despite a lot written to the contrary he had an exemplary war record and was a courier entrusted with a lot of vital information.
Now for the review. In Mein Kampf, Hitler sets forth his feelings on the state of affairs in Europe, Germany’s “punishment” resulting from the treaty of Versailles, which placed extreme financial and military constraints on the country as punishment and extraordinary reparations for the war. Hitler blames this on how the “Bolshevik Jews” had betrayed his country. Then he begins to lay out his plan for the creation of a new state and a new nationalist party.
Since Hitler is writing this in the first person, more as a manifesto than as anything autobiographical, my review will not focus on the content, except to explain what he intended it to accomplish, but will focus more on the translation and the place in the history of WW II that this manifesto holds.
Hitler wanted his readers to understand why and how they had been betrayed(in his mind) and what needed to be done to remedy this. He lays out in detail the peoples involved in the betrayal and their motives, as he saw them. He then turned to his vision for a master Aryan race centered on an expanded German Republic, the third republic, or Third Reich. His plan, which required war to implement was basically to expand the “Greater German Empire” to include Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and at least parts of France that were once German. This especially included the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been political footballs for centuries and reverted to France under the Treaty of Versailles.
This is more easily understood in the context of who Hitler was and what he saw as the role of the German/Aryan race in leading the world. He expounds on this at length.
Hitler was born in Northern Austria to parents with deep German roots, as nearly all peoples of that part of Austria had. Historically, the Austrians have always been dominated by Germanic peoples. Their national language is German. Many of the citizens of Austria, even today, identify as “German”.
We bought my grandson a knife in Durnstein, Austria last year. At least three times the shopkeeper referred to the reason the knife he recommended was best was “German steel”.
At the outbreak of WW I, Hitler, who was a student in Munich, petitioned Kaiser Wilhelm to be allowed to join the German Army, and his request was granted. As he was an Austrian citizen, this was necessary for him to enlist.
He became a battlefield courier and this gave him immense access to the inner workings of the military operations. This knowledge and his bright mind would later explain how he learned so much militarily as such a low-ranking officer. It also gave him a knowledge of who was competent and who wasn’t – at least from his perspective.
One of the most amazing facts gleaned by me from his extensive work was his respect for the British, prior to the war. (To a great extent, this continued even during the war but, of course Hitler wrote this before WW II) Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler continually praises the strength and military competence of the British. He in fact, hoped to form some sort of alliance with them to avoid having to involve them in the conflict. Hitler would have been perfectly content to let the British sit out the war and never to attack them. Even to my own surprise, it is clear from his writings that at this point at least he simply wanted to create a vast German State, free of Jews, Bolsheviks, and Slavs. He had no desire to conquer the world. He felt Germany deserved “breathing room”.
One of the things he blamed WW I on was the Hapsburg Family’s slanting away from it’s Germanic roots to become more Slavic. He considered the joint empire with Hungary, which incorporated Czechoslovakia, to be an abandonment of German traditions and a weakening of the Germanic influence within the Austrian empire. (at that time known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
[For those not familiar with the Hapsburgs, they were the dynasty that ruled Austria for well over 500 years and were the most powerful monarchs in Europe for much of that time. They were the buffer between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire which encompassed most of the Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Byzantium, or as it was then known Constantinople and is today Istanbul. Ferdinand of Spain, the Ferdinand of Isabella and Ferdinand fame, financiers of Columbus and his voyages to America, was a Hapsburg as was Emperor Maximillian of Mexico just to name a couple of offshoots of the family. For most of their history, the Emperor of Austria also held the somewhat honorary title of “Holy Roman Emperor”]
This charge had a lot of validity and to add fuel to the fire, so to speak, the Emperor at the outbreak of WW I, Franz Joseph, had named his nephew Franz Ferdinand, who was seen as a Czech, as his successor.
As a side-note filled with irony, Franz Ferdinand was first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm as well as Czarina Alexandra of Russia and King George of England. All were grandchildren of Queen Victoria. In a way, WW I was also a family feud. The actual trigger point for WW I was the assasination of Franz Ferdinand by Serbian operatives aligned with Russia and Britain.
To summarize Hitler’s plan briefly, he wanted to occupy most of Poland, which was then held by the Soviet Bolshevik’s and basically get rid of all the ethnic population, especially Jews and Slavs, to give Germany some “growing space”. He also had the same basic plan for the other areas mentioned above but saw most of the Austrians as natural Germans. After all, they were from the same ethnic areas and spoke German as their national language, and Hitler himself was born in Austria as an Austrian citizen.
At this time, he did not plan to kill all these people – he just intended to relocate them out of his new Germany. [Even early in WW II he held onto this plan and only abandoned it when he was told that transporting large populations to the Belgian Congo, his desired resettlement area, was impossible with the Allies blockading German ports. When Belgium was occupied early in the war, the Congo fell under his control.]
Another key thing about the Ford Version of Mein Kampf is it makes clear that Hitler saw stupidity as his second most important adversary and just reading the work makes clear his intolerance for both non-Germans and stupid people, regardless of their ethnicity. The basis for this later inclusion of all mentally challenged and the disabled in his massive purges can be understood better in light of this part of his personality.
A very surprising thing that comes up over and over is that although he never refers to God directly, he constantly talks in religious overtones about the Creator and his obvious agreement in principle with Hitler’s plans, as if they were divinely inspired.
A couple of other major facts that separate this translation was the inclusion for the first time of certain materials Hitler censored out over time and Ford’s extensive defining of terms that modern readers might not readily understand through inclusion of parenthetical notes defining what Hitler was referring to, such as his slang expression for the renowned German composer Wagner. His reference to Wagner would make absolutely no sense as he did not name him but only referred to him by a slang term of respect that was easily understandable by Germans of his era but few others.
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Overall, this is an important read, not just for the immense perspective it gives on World War II but for the patterns of political style that have been copied by nearly every dictator and wannabe since.
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