Mein Kampf is Back

(photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, 1927)

Hitler’s 1927 double-volume book of hate is back. Out of copyright, the feeling is that it should be out there, to stand as an example of the dangers of messianic self-belief [as H.R. Trevor-Roper put it], excessive unification movements (e.g. the pan German movement and lebensraum to the east) and racial purity (and vilification).

William Shirer noted “it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against  Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make…”*

[* The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).]