Review of Mein Kampf, Volume One by Adolf Hitler

My personal copy of Mein Kampf

Category: Non-fiction, biography, memoir, politics, history
Translator: Ralph Manheim
Page Count: 370 (First Mariner Books Edition)
Year of Publication: 1999
Rating: 3/5
10-Word Summary: Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, political ideology, and future plans for Germany.

About Mein Kampf, Volume One
I’ve always wanted to read Mein Kampf, not because I’m some closet Nazi or an admirer of Adolf Hitler; rather, I’ve always wanted to read it out of sheer curiosity. This is even more true now than in the past because it’s becoming more difficult to find the book in stores. Amazon, where I bought my copy, stopped selling the book because Jewish organizations were complaining that Amazon was profiting off anti-Semitism. On eBay, my copy of Mein Kampf, which I bought on Amazon for $20 in 2020, is now going for prices as high as $550. And this trend will only continue so long as the book becomes harder to find.

But I will say this: If you want to understand Adolf Hitler, not what he did, but why he did, then this is a must-read. Only in the pages of Mein Kampf do we get in the mind of Germany’s future dictator and truly understand his motives and vision of reality—a vision stained by social Darwinism and anti-Semitism.

Volume One of Mein Kampf is autobiographical. Hence, the book starts with young Adolf’s upbringing in Vienna and ends with the early stages of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—or Nazi Party for short. But this is not autobiography for the sake of telling you his life story; this is autobiography for the sake of politics. Hitler will give bits and pieces of his life and then rant for pages on some political point until he eventually gets back to his autobiography for a few pages, and then he goes on another rant. This pattern continues until you get to the end of the volume.

For example, in his chapter on the World War, Hitler doesn’t discuss his experience as a runner in the trenches. Rather, he uses the chapter to discuss why Germany lost the war, and he rants for pages about how the war was lost on the homefront and not on the battlefield. He blames the pacifists, he blames the press, but most of all, he blames the Jews.

Understanding Hitler
The most important chapter for understanding Adolf Hitler’s beliefs and motives are to be found in chapters two and three where Hitler discusses the period of his life spent in Vienna. After the death of his father and mother, Hitler moved to Vienna to pursue his dreams of architecture.

While the young Hitler worked as a building laborer, many of Hitler’s co-workers were members of the Social Democratic Party: a Marxist political party consisting of members of the working classes whose goals were to grant the working classes more political rights. His co-workers tried to convince him to join a trade union. Trade unions had only thirty years earlier won the right for workers to strike in industrialized nations such as Great Britain. But Hitler despised their ideas because, for them, the government, laws, and schools were nothing but tools to oppress the working classes:

These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the ‘capitalistic’ (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoise for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of the law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders…. There was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud of a terrifying depth. (Page 40)

But what Hitler took notice of was how effective and successful their demonstrations and trade union strikes were because of their use of force on their employer. Hence, Hitler concluded that the only way to combat their use of force was to use a greater amount of force in return. In the words of Hitler:

Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror. (Pages 43-44)

But not only did Hitler believe that force and terror were effective methods of governing, he also believed that the masses needed a strong leader to guide that force. His belief was that the masses needed a leader or commander, tolerating no other political party other than the that of the leader’s.

His beliefs were confirmed while he sat and listened in on a session of the Austrian parliament. During the session, he came to the belief that democracy was ineffective because responsibility could only rest on the individual and not in the majority of a body of individuals. Hence, when something in the country went wrong, no one could be said to be truly responsible for what happened.

And it was on the streets of Vienna where he developed his two major beliefs while reading primarily from political pamphlets, as well as books and newspapers: social-Darwinism and anti-Semitism.

His anti-Semitism, especially, is all over Mein Kampf. Why did Germany lose the First World War? They were betrayed on the homefront by the Jews. Who was responsible for the evils of Marxism? The Jews. Why did Imperial Germany collapse into the hated Weimar Republic? It’s what the Jews wanted. And this goes on and on until finally, in chapter eleven, “Nation and Race,” he explains in detail why he despises the Jews so much.

Hitler states that the Jews have always been money-lending people only interested in self-preservation, the opposite of the Aryan-descended Germans who sacrificed themselves for the sake of preserving their race. Even though the Jews have always bounced around from civilization to civilization throughout history without a home of their own, they have always preserved themselves by lending money at high interest rates, thereby destroying the various working and lower classes of society in every and any civilization they root themselves in.

But their latest plan, according to Hitler, is world domination. He cites The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion (Page 307) as leaked proof that the Jews were secretly conspiring to dominate the world. Their plan was, after the industrial revolution, to enslave the working classes, since the they owned the means of production (i.e. the factories). Once Jews made the working classes toil endlessly in factories, the working classes would strike to ask for more political rights. The Jews would then give them an offer they couldn’t refuse: Marxism. Through Marxism, the Jews could then take political control of these groups of unhappy people and have them, ultimately, seize the government. By then spreading this movement to other nations, such as what the Soviet Union was doing in spreading communism to other nations, the final goal of world domination would be achieved.

Hitler says all this without citing a shred of evidence. As a matter of fact, some of the only proof he cites is the above mentioned Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, which has long since been proved to be a fabricated document, and the lectures of a self-taught economist by the name of Gottfried Feder who would later write The Manifesto for Breaking the Financial Slavery to Interest and would later become Hitler’s State Secretary at the Reich Ministry of Economics.

Final Thoughts
I could say much more, but I will save it for my upcoming book since I have a whole chapter on Adolf Hitler, the decisions he made that led the world into the Second World War, and how he developed his beliefs that got him there. But if this was the 1920s and someone had asked me to summarize Mein Kampf in one sentence, I would say: “A disgruntled former German soldier explains his political ideology which involves conspiracy theories as to why the Jews were the reason Germany lost the World War and why Jews are the real enemy of both Germany and the world.”