Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his life and thoughts
Although potentially having committed high treason, Adolf Hitler was sentenced to only five years in prison for the unsuccessful coup that he launched in 1923, in which 20 people died. In the end, he served only nine months in Landsberg prison and he used the time to dictate a book about his life and beliefs. Whilst he was sure that the reading public was itching to know everything about his view of the world, he was also hoping to raise his political profile and earn some money to pay the legal fees incurred during his trial.
Hitler’s book often quoted nationalist and anti-Semitic authors, but rarely engaged with any facts. Instead, Hitler preferred to set out what he would do were he ever to gain political power. Anti-Semitic calumnies – that Jews promoted prostitution in order to weaken the German nation through the spread of syphilis, whilst enslaving Germans through Marxism and capitalism – provided the backdrop for a programme of paranoid megalomania. A National Socialist government would not only fight the “Jewish” ideologies of Marxism and capitalism but would also work to destroy its adherents. In foreign policy terms, Hitler argued for the need to conquer an empire in Eastern Europe in order to enable the Germans to access the resources and “living space” that they needed to thrive. The first volume of Mein Kampf was published on 18 July 1925; a second volume followed a year later. Over ten million copies of the first volume had been printed by 1945, and it was frequently discussed in the Nazi press. The screed was also translated into a number of foreign languages, including English, French and Russian. No one can say that they had not been warned.
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