Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)

"Jews here and Jews there and Jews everywhere." (pg. 410)

As a graduate of modern history and a World War Two buff, I've always felt I should read Mein Kampf – I've certainly read about its results. And as someone with an odd sense of humour, I've always sort of liked the idea of reading Mein Kampf ironically, and then writing a no doubt hilarious straight-faced review about how the source material doesn't match up to all the films based on it (Saving Private Ryan, etc.), let alone the live show more re-enactment.

The book's actually quite hard to get hold of nowadays for a decent price, considering it's in the public domain (I guess no one wants the copyright, and besides, they keep the price on academic editions artificially high to deter neo-Nazi looky-loos). Not that I wanted Mein Kampf for a coffee-table book, of course, but nor did I want to inadvertently bung money towards some far-right self-publisher on Amazon and end up on a government watchlist. But I still wanted a serviceable copy. I can't imagine anything worse than buying a used, well-thumbed edition of Mein Kampf – it'd be like buying second-hand underpants – so the edition I eventually chose was a Jaico edition from India; relatively cheap but brand new (the swastika has less stigma attached to it over there). This edition, however, proved to be chock full of typos, printing errors and misalignments. But then again, if there's one book you're probably allowed to treat shabbily, it's this one.

It's probably not a surprise to learn that a book by Adolf Hitler is awful; what's surprising is that it's even more awful than you imagine. Of course, there's all the stuff about the Jews and race and the cleansing power of war, which is more than a tad strong, but that's to be expected: it is Mein Kampf, after all. But you'd expect the book to have a certain raciness, a perverse entertainment factor at being so woefully inappropriate.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case: even read ironically, this is a terrible experience. It's absolute dreck: tedious, tautological rambling for six hundred (!) pages, lacking any lyrical or structural writing ability whatsoever. It has a handful of ideas which it then unpacks, repacks and unpacks and repacks and unpacks over and over again with complete ideological mercilessness. In reading this ironically, my commitment to the bit rather backfired, for the only book less appealing than Mein Kampf is Mein Kampf unabridged.

Another surprise is that, for the most part, the book is rather banal: it is My Struggle, a political memoir by an upstart radical politician talking with super-sincerity about his journey and his political 'awakening'. With its obsession with racial hierarchies and reinventing the political wheel, all in the name of the 'ordinary, hard-working folks', the book confirms what I have long suspected about political discourse, even (perhaps especially) in our current time: the extremists dominate the discussion because they have far more stamina for this tedious business than reasonable people do. Any sane person will find reading this book an arse-ache; but, by Christ, imagine writing it.

One unironical impression I got from the book saw me put my history graduate cap on: the extent to which Mein Kampf was a blueprint for all that came later. Some eminent historians, such as Ian Kershaw, have cited passages about 'extermination' of Jews as evidence the Holocaust was always intended. Personally, I didn't get this from the book: certainly, the Jews are repeatedly identified by Hitler as the ultimate and implacable enemy, but there's no grand plan offered here. As it stands, I'm of the mind that what eventually became the Holocaust was an escalation, exacerbated by the war. What is beyond doubt is that war and persecution was certainly intended: Hitler makes no bones about seeking 'lebensraum' in the East and in reversing the Versailles treaty: in his mind, the latter speaks to a wider trend of German disgrace and impurity, which can only be purged by a great blood-letting. When he writes of feeling "calm and cool" at the recognition there will have to be a war "by the whetted sword" (pg. 561), or that the "coming struggle" against Russia will be under conditions that "assume the character of sheer slaughter" (pg. 589), you can't help but feel disconcerted, knowing as we do what was to be initiated by this man.

That said, the book was published seven years before Hitler was elected and thirteen years before war broke out, so that's a long time for ideas and strategies to change. Hitler himself even said, to one of his cronies year later, that he would never have written Mein Kampf if he had known he was going to become chancellor of Germany. You can also see why, despite the fanaticism evident in the book, statesmen in the 1930s thought Hitler might be an ally, or at least harmless or controllable. He is resolutely anti-Marxist in these pages, as well as indulging in some of your meat-and-drink demagoguery and rah-rah trade unionism; what becomes clear is that he is very much a national socialist, even though not a Marxist, and many of his converts in the early years came from the left (those George Orwell later identified as communists "who will be fascists five years hence"). If you try to read the book from the perspective of 1926, rather than with the knowledge of what happened between 1939 and 1945, it's much harder to pin him down as such an apocalyptic threat – certainly by the mores of the time, with anti-Semitism a common prejudice, Marxism resurgent, and Germany paupered. From a historical perspective, such a dangerous knot of complacency and power is fascinating to try to assess.

And, taking my history-grad cap off again, it's much harder to pin him down when the book is so bloody tedious. Not an ounce of real personality comes through in six hundred pages. It says a lot that Hitler was later embarrassed by its publication; the man had one bollock, shit facial hair and chronic flatulence, to say nothing of being the berk who both started World War Two and lost it, so for Mein Kampf to be the one thing that left him rather sheepish only illustrates its abject awfulness. He should have at least included a few funny anecdotes. show less

I’ve departed from my usual practice of assigning a book rating of one to five stars. How can you rate a blueprint for so much evil? If you give it more than one star, does that mean you resonate with Adolf Hitler? If you found it instructive, should you suppress your rating for fear of appearing sympathetic?

I couldn’t answer these questions without encouraging a review of myself rather than the book, and the book deserves a review. For one thing, the dark side of social media is that it show more provides both bots and neo-Nazis an opportunity to network and resurrect doctrines that should be dead. Hitler’s drive toward world domination began with the expression of ideas, so his ghostly online afterlife is reason enough to fortify against a rematerialization in the real world.

But for another and more general thing, “Mein Kampf” is a masterclass in the manipulation of human psychology for the purpose of taking and using power. Hitler may have been a maniac, but he knew what makes people tick. And if you know what makes people tick, you can get down into the gears and make them tick to your time.

For example, Hitler knew that when you’re an unpopular fringe, you might wonder how you can possibly be right when so many different factions are united only in their opposition to you. The answer is to manufacture a single villain: “Hence a multiplicity of different adversaries must be combined so that in the eyes of the masses of one’s own supporters this struggle is directed against only one enemy. This strengthens faith in their own right and enhances bitterness against those who attack it.”

I now think of this passage when someone complains about the Patriarchy or the Uniparty or Whiteness or Globalism. It’s the same tactic: if you can get people to believe that one enemy lurks behind every mask, then you can control and direct their anger to your ends.

But here’s where you need to be careful. When someone gets called a Nazi, the classic and correct retort is, “Hitler liked dogs, so is everyone who likes dogs a Nazi?” While it’s legitimate to notice when unscrupulous people use a tactic Hitler used, it’s impossible to be unscrupulous in the pursuit of power without taking a page out of his book. When it comes to achieving ends through corrupt means, Hitler used them all.

If anything, reading “Mein Kampf” has made me even more wary of transgressing Godwin’s law. The truth is that no one was or is like Adolf Hitler. He spawned a pseudo-historical, pseudo-scientific, and pseudo-spiritual cult of violence, founded on a doctrine of human existence as a zero-sum and exterminatory war of survival between races: “Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”

For Hitler, of course, the great enemy of humanity was the Jew, and the fight against the Jew was a fight for human existence: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”

That said, it’s difficult to see a horizon for Hitler’s war against “blood poisoning” and for fresh soil to expand the stock of pure German blood. Though the Nazis never rounded up Africans for extermination during the war, Hitler expressed frequent disdain for them. In a world where he won, it would only have been a matter of time before they went to the camps; and ultimately, it’s hard to see how more “pure” Germans wouldn’t eventually turn on less “pure” Germans in an ouroboros of blood.

Much more could be said about “Mein Kampf,” whether we’re talking about Hitler’s contempt for the process of democratic compromise, the internal incoherence of his thoughts, the use of the “big lie” to control mass populations, or his rationale for total control of media for propaganda purposes. But what I want to close with is the Führerprinzip, the Leader Principle.

Hitler asserted the foundational dogma of totalitarianism, that the only rational form of government is a single man who bears ultimate power and, thus, ultimate responsibility. Councilors and parliaments may advise the great man, but they may never rule or contradict. Every decision of state is his, and his alone.

This has an illusory appearance of strength, since one man can move faster and more decisively and more aggressively than a deliberative body. But as totalitarians have discovered time and again, this principle carries the seeds of its own destruction. A leader without check or balance eventually unbalances, leading his followers into annihilation.

This is illustrated by Hitler’s own obsession with Jews. He saw them both as drivers of capitalist exploitation in the form of global finance and as organizers of Marxist street mobs agitating against that exploitation, all with the aim of breaking down national identities and enslaving every race under international Jewry.

That’s right: Hitler saw the same enemy behind every mask, the very tactic he so cynically used on his own people. This led him into a disastrous war that destroyed a generation and cleared the way for the Soviet Union to destroy generations more. When your house is built on lies and supported by absolute power, you eventually lose yourself in a hall of mirrors, a hall from which no one is brave enough to save you, a hall that ends in a bunker.

“Mein Kamp” is almost one hundred years old at the time of my reading, but as a cautionary tale it could’ve been written yesterday. There’s never been anyone like the Nazis, but there will also never be a shortage of vicious people who want to use you for their own ends. Hitler’s manifesto might be helpful as an inoculation against such people, but only if you can handle the twist in your stomach when you close the book and realize you’ve been spending time with depravity incarnate. show less

What is most striking about Hitler is that I've yet to feel "his" struggle. He seems more bent on revenge than some admirable cause, much like Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. V in V for Vendetta shared much in common with him as well. They all justified violence as a means for liberation or empowerment. He seems to genuinely care for the German people but his hatred of Jews overshadows his ability to reason or act rationally. His "movement" may have genuine nationalistic show more ingredients but I can't help but feel it's all too personal in nature. When you see how he treated the SA in later years you'll realize people were recruited to his cause as just the means to his ends. show less

Mercifully easier to read than the interminable noodling dreck that is Mein Kampf, this book of Hitler's Wartime Conversations (more commonly known as Hitler's Table Talk) is still very heavy-going. Hitler's supposedly magnetic charisma refuses to translate into English on the page, and those history buffs like myself seeking to gain insight into the mind of the individual who started the Second World War will find themselves facing a wall. It's a wall with the occasional crack in it, show more allowing light to shine through in fragments, but a wall nonetheless.

The greatest value of the book is in revising and remedying our view of Hitler. Not rehabilitation, of course, though it's the unfortunate lot of the World War Two buff that you may inadvertently raise a few eyebrows among your peers if you reveal you have committed to reading a full book of Adolf Hitler's conversations. Rather, the revision is welcome because it has become commonplace in our culture to present Adolf Hitler as a sort of cartoon villain, whether that's the unhinged ranter of the Nuremberg rallies and popular culture, the lucky provincial buffoon painted by the propagandists and the commentators, or (a view that has become more common nowadays) the empty vessel into which dupes poured their own hatreds and prejudices and saw them made manifest. Even many otherwise astute historians fall into one of these traps. The obvious alternative – that Hitler was an intelligent politician who acted rationally (by his own lights) in pursuit of a grand design – is one that people are still reluctant to acknowledge.

Hitler's Wartime Conversations reveal an individual far more multifaceted than the cartoonish personification of evil we are often presented with. There's little discussion of the war then being prosecuted (most of the conversations are from 1941-42, with some from 1943-44, almost twenty years after our last direct insight via Mein Kampf), but that makes sense considering these conversations took place in personal moments, not the councils of war. Instead, we get Hitler's opinions – sometimes educated, sometimes trite – on art, architecture, his plans for German colonisation in the East, his memories of his rise to power, and numerous other asides. Much of the content will therefore be predictable for those who already have a basic education on the man (and who, choosing to read this book, wouldn't?), but there are still a few surprises. It's peculiar to read Adolf Hitler of all people speculating about life on other planets, but alongside such goofiness there are also some illuminating revelations. For one thing, I'd never appreciated Hitler's deep hatred for Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, until I read him seize every available opportunity to express it in these Conversations.

While it's not the full picture of the man and comes with some caveats (not least that they were originally compiled – and therefore curated – by Hitler's fanatically loyal secretary Martin Bormann), Hitler's Wartime Conversations is perhaps the closest primary source we have for an insight into one of the most dangerous radicals in history. Hitler as shown here is banal, intelligent and in full awareness of what he is doing, has done, and will do. And that, to me, is far more educating, revealing – and unnerving – than the cartoon villain that so many still cling to. show less