A GRAVE REMINDER, NOT A CELEBRATION

Text by Max

On 18 July 1925, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Volume I (Eine Abrechnung), was first published in Munich by Franz Eher Verlag. Written during Hitler’s imprisonment following the failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923), the work combines autobiography, nationalist mythology, racial ideology, and anti-Semitic invective. As we mark the centenary of this publication, the date should serve not as a commemoration but as an intellectual warning: Mein Kampf endures as a case study in how conspiracy theories, resentment, and pseudo-history metastasised into genocidal policies.

Adolf Hitler and fellow inmates at Landsberg Prison, 1924. From left to right: Adolf Hitler, Emil Maurice (standing, holding a mandolin), Generalleutnant Hermann Kriebel, Rudolf Hess, and Dr Friedrich Weber. The photograph was taken during Hitler’s imprisonment following the failed Beer Hall Putsch. It was at Landsberg that Hitler dictated the first volume of Mein Kampf to Hess, while surrounded by loyal supporters from paramilitary and nationalist circles.

FROM MARGINAL TEXT TO CENTRAL IDEOLOGY (1925–1945)

Initially, its readership was limited, with contemporaries often dismissing it as stylistically crude and ideologically disjointed. However, the political ascent of Hitler and the Nazi Party from 1930 onwards transformed the text into an ideological cornerstone. By 1933, it had become mandatory reading among Nazi functionaries, civil servants, and students. According to historian Othmar Plöckinger in Geschichte eines Buches (2011, pp. 210–215), readership surged after 1933, particularly among party officials and bureaucrats.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, over five million copies had been distributed. It was commonly gifted to newlyweds, soldiers, and party loyalists. While it is true that many copies remained unread, scholarship has demonstrated a significant level of engagement with the text within Nazi administrative structures and educational institutions.

IDEOLOGICAL CONTENT: ANTISEMITISM, ANTI-DEMOCRACY, AND LEBENSRAUM

Mein Kampf articulates a pseudo-Darwinian racial hierarchy in which Aryans are described as culture-bearers, and Jews as the parasitic antithesis—the destroyers of all civilisation. Hitler refers to Jews as "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil" (Vol. I, Chapter 11). These rhetorical tropes, far from mere invective, were foundational in shaping genocidal policy.

As Saul Friedländer notes in Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997), Hitler's language prepared the ground for exclusion, dehumanisation and, ultimately, extermination: "The essential core of Nazi antisemitism was a call to action, couched in a vision of apocalyptic conflict." Peter Longerich similarly argues in Holocaust (2010) that Nazi policy evolved from ideological premises clearly articulated in Hitler’s early writings.

The doctrine of Lebensraum, first systematised in Mein Kampf, framed Eastern Europe as a colonial frontier for German expansion. As Timothy Snyder demonstrates in Bloodlands (2010, pp. 12–15), this ideology rationalised conquest alongside the displacement or extermination of Slavic populations—a process integral to Nazi racial imperialism.

Parliamentary democracy, according to Hitler, was a tool of Jewish subversion and weakness. He denounced the Weimar Republic as degenerate, proposing instead the Führerprinzip: a totalitarian model in which the leader embodied the racial will of the people and operated above institutional constraint.

Recent work by Annette Timm (The Politics of Fertility, 2023) highlights how the text’s racial ideology was inextricable from its policing of gender roles and sexuality—a dimension that further enabled dehumanisation.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEBATES: BLUEPRINT OR POLITICAL MYTH?

Historians remain divided on whether Mein Kampf constitutes a concrete plan for genocide or a broader ideological fantasy. Intentionalist scholars, such as Lucy Dawidowicz, argue that Hitler's exterminatory intent was clearly formed by the early 1920s. Functionalist interpretations, represented by Christopher Browning and Ian Kershaw, maintain that genocide emerged incrementally through bureaucratic escalation and cumulative radicalisation.

Kershaw (1998, p. 124) cautions against reading Mein Kampf as a detailed programme, suggesting instead that the book is significant for establishing a worldview that legitimated extreme policies. The 2016 critical edition published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ), edited by Christian Hartmann and colleagues, affirms this view. Spanning over 2,000 pages and annotated with more than 3,500 scholarly footnotes, the edition meticulously contextualises Hitler’s sources, language, and historical allusions. As Sybille Steinbacher notes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2017), the edition "dismantles Mein Kampf as political myth and exposes it as an artefact of racial ideology and personal resentment." Nicolas Berg’s work The Holocaust and the West German Historians (2015) further traces how postwar scholarship has struggled with the book’s legacy.

POST-1945: SUPPRESSION, RE-EMERGENCE, AND SCHOLARLY RESPONSIBILITY

Following Germany's defeat in 1945, Mein Kampf was banned by the Allied Control Council. The Bavarian state government, as copyright holder, prohibited republication. This legal embargo, lasting until 2015, reflected broader anxieties about the text's potential as neo-Nazi propaganda.

With the expiry of copyright, the IfZ edition was released to wide academic acclaim. Far from revitalising the text’s ideological potency, the edition dismantled its mythic stature by reframing it as a historical document to be dissected rather than revered. It sold over 100,000 copies and became an essential resource in history curricula and university libraries.

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE: POPULISM, VICTIMHOOD, AND RADICALISATION

Contemporary far-right movements often reproduce the rhetorical architecture of Mein Kampf. Roger Griffin (2022) has noted that themes of national decline, racial purity, and conspiratorial thinking have migrated seamlessly into 21st-century populist discourse. These motifs, while often stripped of overt Nazi symbolism, remain functionally similar.

The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), in its 2023 annual report, identifies a persistent revival of these patterns through digital platforms. Matthew Feldman (2020) has further argued that modern fascism is marked by a transhistorical recycling of core tropes—particularly the framing of ethnic majorities as victimised minorities. One need look no further than recent political rhetoric surrounding the so-called "Great Replacement" theory, which echoes Hitler's warnings of national contamination and demographic peril.

Although most modern extremists do not cite Mein Kampf directly, their ideological scaffolding reflects its legacy: a synthesis of grievance, racial essentialism, and civilisational nostalgia. These enduring patterns make the centenary not a historical footnote, but an urgent opportunity for critical engagement.

CONCLUSION: READING AGAINST THE GRAIN

On this centenary of Mein Kampf, it is neither responsible nor ethical to commemorate the book in celebratory terms. Yet to ignore it would be equally hazardous. As historians, educators, and citizens, we must engage with the text critically, contextually, and unsparingly.

The lesson of Mein Kampf transcends Hitler and the Nazis. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of ideologised resentment, dehumanising mythologies, and the seductive power of conspiracy. In 1925, the world largely ignored Hitler’s warnings. In 2025, as democracies worldwide confront resurgent authoritarianism, the question is no longer whether we read Mein Kampf, but how we dismantle its enduring logic.

Select Bibliography

Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust and the West German Historians, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Perennial, 1992.
Matthew Feldman, Fascist Ideology Reborn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, HarperCollins, 1997.
Roger Griffin, Fascism's New Faces: The Rebirth of Extremism in the 21st Century, Routledge, 2022.
Christian Hartmann et al. (eds.), Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition, IfZ (Munich), 2016.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, Penguin Press, 1998.
Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf 1922–1945, Oldenbourg, 2011.
Sybille Steinbacher, "Critical Reading of Mein Kampf: The Annotated Edition," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2017.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2010.
Annette Timm, The Politics of Fertility: Reproduction, Gender, and Power in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), Annual Report on Online Radicalisation, 2023.

18 JULY 2025. 100 YEARS SINCE MEIN KAMPF, VOLUME I