When Germany lost World War I, Hitler and other German nationalists blamed the defeat on "back-stabbing Jews," Marxists and other leftist elements in German politics. Von Schoenerer wanted to see the creation of a "Pan German" state that absorbed the Germanic parts of Austria, and he successfully used the Jews as both a scapegoat and enemy of his cause. Rejected from art school, young Hitler peddled postcards in the streets of Vienna, where he absorbed the rhetoric of the Austrian politician Georg von Schoenerer. "With satanic joy in his face," wrote Hitler, "the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people."Īnti-Semitism is ugly on its own, but when Hitler was in Austria, he also learned how to employ anti-Semitism as a political tool. All the while, Hitler insisted, the Jew was plotting to dilute the purity of Aryan blood. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler parroted Chamberlain's conception of the Jewish people as the chief opposition, writing, "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew."Īccording to Hitler, Jews were "parasites" who fed on the Aryan culture before undermining its superior Aryan instincts with "Jewish" concepts like Marxism and humanistic thinking. In an 1899 book, Chamberlain forwarded the idea that all of history was a clash between the Aryans and the "Semites," and that only "Germanism" could rescue the world from the grips of Jewish conspirators. Next came Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born music critic who respected the German composer Richard Wagner as much for his rabid anti-Semitism as his operas. Its release triggered heated debate over the merits of reading "Mein Kampf," even in a heavily annotated edition that actively calls out Hitler's lies. In 2016, an annotated critical edition of "Mein Kampf" was reprinted for the first time since the end of the war in Germany on the day that its original copyright expired. After World War II, as humanity struggled to process the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust, Hitler's best-seller was banned from respectable bookshelves and lurked in the popular imagination as the most dangerous and taboo of texts.
Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Imagesįrom 1925 to 1945, more than 12 million copies of Adolf Hitler's semi-autobiographical screed "Mein Kampf" (in English, "My Struggle") were sold worldwide and translated into 18 different languages. A library manager holds (L-R) French, Finnish and Danish editions of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" at the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich, Germany, Dec.
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