Monsters don’t usually write autobiographies, not ones that are reasonably accurate anyway. Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his friend and underling, Rudolf Hess while both men were incarcerated in Landsburg prison in 1924 for their role in leading a group of militant Nazis against a Bavarian minister’s attempt to separate that region from the rest of Germany. The Nazis were ambushed by the army and Hitler was thrown in prison. In his introduction Hitler actually expresses gratitude that his incarceration gave him time to write his memoirs and political philosophies.
Mein Kampf is a highly unusual piece of writing: part bildungsroman, part philosophical/political treatise and part history. I have to confess; it is a good read. That is to say, it uses lucid and descriptive prose to tell its story. Much like Caesar’s Commentaries, Mein Kampf focuses on fact and the bold statement of opinion with little room for flowery language. The tone is at times arrogant and martial while it can veer into the sentimental and even occasionally into self-mockery. I do not know whether or not Hitler spoke and Hess simply copied verbatim, but I would not be surprised if the text represents Hitler’s actual words. He was a highly literate man, well versed in history, politics and German philosophy. Hitler was also a superb and experienced public speaker, so his mental faculties for organizing his thoughts, drawing analogies and formulating arguments was probably highly developed.
Mein Kampf is a difficult book to find. In many European countries Mein Kampf, such as Austria and the Netherlands is completely illegal. In other nations, like France, the book is only available in highly annotated form. In the United States, however, there is no such censorship and therefore you can find Mein Kampf if you are willing to look for it. You won’t find the words of Adolf Hitler in any Barnes and Noble to be sure but you can order a copy from Amazon or EBay. At my roommate’s suggestion I checked Project Gutenberg, the website that provides internet transcriptions of books for which the copyright has lapsed. I couldn’t find Mein Kampf on the American or British versions of the site but when I checked the Australian site, I hit pay dirt.
Adolf Hitler is most famous for his massacre of 6 million Jews and millions of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals and the handicapped. Hitler also was the person who bears greatest responsibility for starting World War II, which claimed 55 million lives! If you take it a step further, Hitler’s war would bequeath its terrible legacy to Eastern Europe in the form of the Cold War. Adolf Hitler certainly left his stamp on human history. So why would I want to read Mein Kampf?
The answer is actually pretty simple. The only evil that I truly fear is the incomprehensible. I can’t stand not understanding why one group of people is killing another. I need to understand, for example, why Al Qaeda declared war on the American people. More importantly, since I am one, I need to understand why Al Qaeda has declared its intention to kill American citizens whenever it practicably can. Thus, I would read the words of Osama Bin Laden if he committed them to paper. For the same reason, I wanted to read Hitler.
Very few people are truly devoted to evil. That’s not to say that there are not evil people, there certainly are, but rather, that almost everyone believes that they are right or justified in anything that they do. There are very few people who commit actions that they consciously know are wrong and for which they have no justification, at least in their own mind. What this means is that the greatest monsters in human history more often than not, thought they were right. Stalin had a vision of what he wanted the Soviet Union to be and he was willing to kill just about anyone to make that vision a reality. A person like Stalin holds a different set of ethics than you or me: a set of ethics that holds the deaths of millions of people a worthwhile cost for the perfection and purification of the Soviet nation. I might disagree with Stalin about his vision of the Soviet Union and the value of human life, but according to his own world view and ethical system, he was right in his actions. Osama Bin Laden also holds a different morality and system of goals than I do, but by his own rationale, he is correct when he conceives of, funds and orders bombings in the name of his interpretation of Islam. What I wanted to know is how someone like Stalin, Hitler or Bin Laden comes by their values.
It is fundamentally dangerous to label an enemy crazy or stupid. Saying that Hitler is crazy is to say that he is irrational-and to underestimate him. We know he was not irrational. No one could organize such a meteoric rise to power and dominance in Europe without being extremely rational. Read the transcripts of the Wannsee conference; the Final Solution was perhaps the most rational, cold blooded and calculated form of genocide in human history. This was no mere forced march into the desert or a military massacre with rifles; the Nazis calculated just how much to starve their victims so as to extract the maximum amount of work and still kill them at the same time. The Nazis also figured out how to kill thousands of people in such a way that it would be an efficient and cost-effective process. Yes, the Holocaust was one of the worst crimes of human history, but it was rational. It was, in fact, a masterpiece of efficiency. No, Hitler and the Nazis were not crazy.
Hitler was also not stupid. His mind had a superb grasp of politics, psychology, oratory, economics and war. Mein Kampf’s first 200 pages are devoted to Hitler’s education in human nature and politics. Born the son of an Austrian government official, Hitler flouted his father’s desire that he become an official. The young Hitler, rather, determined to be an artist and the death of his parents during his adolescence freed him to pursue his career. He traveled to Vienna where an Austrian school of fine arts informed Hitler that he lacked the aptitude to be a painter but that his technical drawing was more than adequate for him to become an architect. Hitler thus entered university with this intention. Vienna was an odd and volatile school for Hitler. He had little money so he was forced to supplement his education through work at various odd jobs. Hitler was also forced to live in the poorest districts in Vienna.
At the same time Hitler discovered a powerful interest in politics. Living in the capital of the vast Habsburg Empire fostered Hitler’s interest in monarchical and parliamentary politics. Hitler had always had a strong political orientation. As a child Hitler was extremely conscious of his German heritage while living in Austria. He regarded it as a crime against ethnic Germany that Austria was excluded from German unification. In Vienna, Hitler found Austrian-Germans treated like an ethnic minority and the vested interests of the various other groups-Hungarians, Czechs and Slavs-tearing the nation apart. In fact, the timing of Hitler’s arrival in Vienna-the decade before World War I, was instrumental in the formation of many of Hitler’s political philosophies.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was in steady decline, an internal decay that was apparent to those living in Vienna but not elsewhere in Europe. Hitler strongly identified with Germany and was horrified to discover that the German Empire has shackled itself to a moribund monarchy by virtue of alliance. This horror was compounded by the fact that just about everyone in Europe knew that a war was coming with the Entente powers. Politically, all in Vienna was chaos during that decade. Hitler attended sessions of Parliament only to leave in disgust at the internecine squabbling of the various factions that were tearing the nation apart. Hitler saw democracy at its worst and formed with worst opinions of it. In reading Hitler’s views, one can sense an almost allergic reaction to the concept of majority rules.
In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest against the inertia of the mass?
Here Hitler gives insight on his views of the powerful and intelligent individual against what he views as the senseless and malleable mass of the people. This very idea is the organizing principle behind just about any dictatorship. Perhaps here Hitler was influenced by Nietzsche and his theory of the “superman.”
Must not our parliamentary principle of government by numerical majority necessarily lead to the destruction of the principle of leadership? Does anybody honestly believe that human progress originates in the composite brain of the majority and not in the brain of the individual personality? Or may it be presumed that for the future human civilization will be able to dispense with this as a condition of its existence? But may it not be that, to-day, more than ever before, the creative brain of the individual is indispensable?
Hitler takes his political philosophies a step further. If the individual is the source of human progress, should not the individual rule? Sounds like a strong justification for tyranny to me. And where did Hitler get these views? By watching a government bogged down in gridlock. What he never stops to realize is that just because Austrian democracy-which was a far cry from the Athenians-was flawed, it did not mean that democracy itself does not work. Perhaps the apathy and the lack of education in his own country was just as much responsible for what Hitler saw as the inherent flaws of the democratic process.
One truth which must always be borne in mind is that the majority can never replace the man. The majority represents not only ignorance but also cowardice. And just as a hundred blockheads do not equal one man of wisdom, so a hundred poltroons are incapable of any political line of action that requires moral strength and fortitude.
Reading these phrases is a bit like watching the mind of a murderer develop. This is how a Machiavellian personality forms. I find the grotesqueries of it to be interesting and revolting but its also a highly useful tool. In Mein Kampf we see the potential consequences for the lapse of civic virtue in a society. The Austrian people’s absolute faith in their Parliament and Emperor allowed the fundamental decay of corruption and professional office seeking to set in and turn gangrenous. If the people had recognized that strong men inevitably arise from chaos and apathy, would they have continued to allow their government to do as it pleased without oversight? If the Austrian Parliament had known Hitler was in the gallery watching them squabble and achieve nothing, would they have been so derelict in the performance of their duties? Perhaps all politicians should read Mein Kampf as a warning. The next time a congressman finesses a pet bill through the House rewarding one of his cronies with a government contract, perhaps he should scan the audience for angry young men watching in disgust.
At the same time Hitler was forming his opinions of democracy, he also discovered, what he perceived to be one of the greatest threats to Germany-communism. Hitler’s introduction to communism-or as he terms it “social democracy”-came when he was working a construction job and the other workers tried to force him to join a labor union. Hitler attended communist meetings, read communist propaganda aimed at the highest and lowest classes and participated in political discussions with the communists themselves and came away horrified. In communism, Hitler perceived a threat to Germans everywhere. Hitler recognized the communist aim of destabilizing a nation through extensive propaganda campaigns in order to overthrow the government and install a communist dictatorship.
Reading about Hitler’s experiences in Vienna is one of the most enlightening parts of the book. Hitler came to Vienna a brash youth with dreams of success as an artist but became transfixed by the politics of a dying empire. During this time Hitler formed the worst opinions about democracy and simultaneously the extreme left-wing alternative, communism. It is no surprise, then, that Hitler chose the alternative: right-wing extremism which placed the welfare of the ethnic nation above all other goods and would act with an iron fist to secure its goals-fascism.
Hitler’s political mission statement is expressed on page 173:
For me and for all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND. What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator. All ideas and ideals, all teaching and all knowledge, must serve these ends. It is from this standpoint that everything must be examined and turned to practical uses or else discarded. Thus a theory can never become a mere dead dogma since everything will have to serve the practical ends of everyday life.
Through modern eyes, it is easy to see the glaring flaws in this philosophy. For one thing, the inherent flaws of racism.
Human rights are above the rights of the State. But if a people be defeated in the struggle for its human rights this means that its weight has proved too light in the scale of Destiny to have the luck of being able to endure in this terrestrial world.
The world is not there to be possessed by the faint-hearted races.
Here one can see Hitler’s belief in a form of social Darwinism; the stronger races deserve to survive and if a “weaker” race is to die out, it is only to the benefit of the mankind as a whole. This very philosophy enabled Hitler to form his theories about Imperialism and territorial acquisition.
For, as things stand to-day, vast spaces still lie uncultivated all over the surface of the globe. Those spaces are only waiting for the ploughshare. And it is quite certain that Nature did not set those territories apart as the exclusive pastures of any one nation or race to be held unutilized in reserve for the future. Such land awaits the people who have the strength to acquire it and the diligence to cultivate it. Nature knows no political frontiers. She begins by establishing life on this globe and then watches the free play of forces. Those who show the greatest courage and industry are the children nearest to her heart and they will be granted the sovereign right of existence.
Hitler came upon his racist views from viewing Austria’s multiculturalism-a system which threatened to tear Austria apart. Throughout Mein Kampf Hitler holds the German people in the highest regard as industrious, honest and productive people. He speaks with scorn of Slavs, the French and most importantly, Jews.
I t is difficult to trace the development of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He professes to have been quite indignant upon hearing anti-Semitic statements in his youth. Hitler claims that he never felt any ill will toward Jews based on their following of another religion but rather their actions as a race. Hitler emphatically points out his belief that Jews are a race masquerading as a religious group. From reading Mein Kampf, what I think is that Hitler came to hate anything that he felt was destroying Germany. Hitler saw a number of forces that threatened Germans: multi-culturalism, international finance, communism, prostitution and the press. After reading some anti-Semitic literature, Hitler was already looking askance at Jews for their cultural uniqueness: their style of dress, their customs and their tendency to be a tight knit community that looks after itself.
Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?
What followed next was that Hitler began to see Jews everywhere in the institutions that he most despised. He saw Jews among the social democrats. He read Jewish names in the newspapers criticizing Germans and German institutions that Hitler happened to respect. Hitler saw Jewish landlords and Jewish pimps and he began to see a Jewish conspiracy to ruin Germany. Hitler fails to recognize that Jewish career options were limited in 1910 Germany and that finance, entertainment and journalism were a few of the fields open to Jews at that time. Hitler also fails to sympathize with the fact that as a nation within a nation, Jews could not help but have divided loyalties. I believe that Hitler did recognize the symptoms of what would almost destroy Germany and Austria, but he fails to make a case that Jews had a leading role in communism or that they had an agenda to specifically slander Germany in the press or that their goal in financial matters to specifically to exploit Germans.
As journalists, German-Jewish writers were probably impartial rather than rabidly nationalistic. Fascism, however, is nothing if not nationalistic. According to Hitler, you don’t criticize the Fatherland, particularly if you are of another race. In 21st Century America, I criticize my country all of the time. Not because I want to drag it down, but because I want America to improve itself. Hitler fails to see that there is more than one way to love your country-not simply blind adulation. As financiers Jews are adept businessmen with the goal of making money, but that’s capitalism. I have never understood why Jews are specifically singled out for playing the money game well. Were Jews involved in communism? Yes, they were. Perhaps because communism professed goals of equality and social liberation-the same reason that many other races were seduced by the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Did Hitler ever bother to see that the contradiction between Jewish prominence in capitalism and communism belie the concept of some Jewish plot to subvert Germany? Could anyone defend Jewish pimps and slumlords? Well, no more or less than one could defend pimps and slumlords of any nationality. Hitler fails to recognize that there are criminals within any race or ethnic group.
That’s what Hitler does in Mein Kampf. He observes what he doesn’t like, does some research and observation, formulates a theory and then professes that theory. Unfortunately, Hitler skips the crucial step in the scientific method: experimentation. Hitler pontificates. He accepts his theories as law pretty much the moment he comes up with them. Hitler never provides evidence or statistics about such things as the percentage of Jewish membership in communist movements or the number of Jewish men arrested as pimps in Vienna.
Hitler suffers from sloppy thinking at several points. Firstly, Hitler begins with preconceived notions and then searches only for that which confirms his notions. Hitler’s preconceived notion is his unshakable belief in German greatness and superiority. From youth Hitler has this romantic image in his head of a Germany in which all ethnic Germans (including Austrians) are united in one nation and that nation should then proceed to acquire the land necessary for the German people to grow and prosper. When this ideal is tested in World War I, Hitler does not blame Germans for holding an over-inflated notion of their own greatness but rather assumes that Germany must have been sabotaged. Hitler blames the “Jewish Press” for sapping the spirit of the army with defeatism and by raising the question as to whether German actions during the war were justified. Granted Hitler criticizes the most glaring strategic mistakes of the German government and military hierarchy-most notably the failure to use propaganda. At the same time, however, Hitler never criticizes German war atrocities like the use of poison gas or the invasion of Belgium. In Hitler’s mind the German people themselves are practically infallible.
Hitler’s emphasis of the Fatherland as the highest ideal was basically a means to justify the nation in whatever it wants to do. In America we celebrate our diversity as a strength that gives our nation versatility and flavor. We also don’t regard our nation as just in all of its actions. The world of the first half the twentieth century was an orgy of nationalism in which each nation viewed its actions as justified. That world was engulfed in the flames of World War I. Today we have an international court of morality and public opinion that condemns nations for their transgressions.
The first third of Mein Kampf basically describes Hitler’s life leading up to and during World War I and how he came to hold his theories. By the end of World War I, it is clear from the author’s words that he is set in his beliefs. Following World War I Hitler discusses his early forays into politics. Hitler felt the typical outrage following the Treaty of Versailles (Hitler would later make the French repudiate the treaty in the same railcar in which the Armistice was signed). Hitler joins the nascent German Worker’s Party and begins his ascent. He has been a novice student of politics, history and propaganda for that past twenty years of his life. He soon discovers that he has a natural aptitude for public speaking. The German people are looking for strength. After the failure of the German monarchy and the weakness of the Weimar Republic, Hitler personifies the vitality that can restore Germany to greatness. Hitler doesn’t “compromise with himself;” he has his ideas. They ossified ideas with pre-thought rationalization. No one knew how far he would go.
It is sobering to realize that Mein Kampf was written in 1924. Hitler presented the world his mental development and education, his state of mind as it was at that time and his plans for the future of Germany. This blue print was a best seller but no one listened. No one heeded the warnings of this book. No one bothered to see the signs that this young man should be denied power.
Everyone should read Mein Kampf. Hitler did one service to humanity in writing this book. He demonstrated to us how a hard world can make an intelligent human being into a genocidal monster. Except he wasn’t a monster. We wish he was; it would make his actions easier to explain and we would be more comfortable with Hitler’s place in history if he was simply an aberration. Hitler was not crazy and he was not stupid. His writing is systematic and eloquent. He had feelings. He cried over the grave of his mother when she died of breast cancer. People loved him; his friends and family called him “Adi.” We need to be reminded that Hitler was human because if one man of above average intelligence and a more or less working conscience can become a fascist dictator and monster just through reading and observation, than so can others.
We live in similar times to Edwardian Germany and Austria. America is threatened by factions and forces within and without. Our government has become convoluted and corrupt. Our elections have become popularity contests and propaganda campaigns. Our legislature is bogged down by partisan squabbling. Out there many Americans are frustrated by the stagnation. Intelligent young men and women read the newspapers, watch television and in their hearts, hatred festers. Nationalism hasn’t died. After all this is the land of “America: Love it or Leave It!” We still see boogey men in those who are different from us. As Yeats once said, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” What ideological monster with a mathematical mind gains strength and motivation from each day of chaos in our country? Perhaps somewhere out there just such a person is considering a career in politics. At least, if we read Mein Kampf, we might be able to recognize him.
