Mein Kampf ( My Combat in French) is a Ouvrage written by Adolf Hitler between 1923 and 1924 during its detention with the prison of Landsberg amndt Lech, detention consecutive with the Putsch of the brewery, missed Coup d'etat. It contains autobiographical elements as well as a presentation of the Idéologie Politique of the Nazisme and the history of the beginnings of NSDAP.

A late best-seller

The first volume was published the July 18th 1925, the second the December 11th 1926. With its publication, the book (which cost the high price, at the time, of twelve Reichsmark S) was only one modest success: until in 1929, only: 23000 specimens of the first volume and: 13000 of the second were sold. After 1930, pulling strongly increased: until in 1935, it will be sold 1,5 of them million specimens. Starting from 1936, it became the wedding gift of the State to the German couples. Ian Kershaw estimates pulling at approximately 10 million German specimens until in 1945, to which the translations in sixteen foreign languages are added.

The literary incomes of Hitler thus enabled him to give up its treatment of chancellor in 1933, which the Propagande Nazi was not deprived to propose.

In February 1936, at the time of an interview, Bertrand de Jouvenel required of Hitler why it had not modified the chapters devoted to France before each new edition:

Drafting

The original text was altered on several occasions by the entourage of Hitler to give him a more coherent and more readable form.

It is all at the same time an autobiographical document, (with regard to the personal life, an alternation between reality and phantasmagoria), the account of the birth and the first development of the party Nazi, and a test and political proclamation which states the bases of the program that its author will apply a few years later when he arrives at the head of the German State. Mein Kampf wants to explain the desire of extermination of its author with respect to the Juif S and the Tzigane S by his racial theories.

He announces without ambiguity the program of the Nazi party, in particular founded on the will of reunification of the territories with Germanic population (the Pangermanisme) as well as the need for ensuring itself, in Eastern Europe, a “vital space” German. He comprises precise threats, which made write to the marshal Lyautey: “Any French must read this book. ”

According to Adolf Hitler:

  • the cartography of the Europe resulting from the Treated of Versailles (“  Diktat of Versailles  ”) is unacceptable, because it has as an immediate consequence the bursting of the people of German culture.
  • the Austria and the German minorities of Czechoslovakia and Poland must be joined together with the Germany in only one space, “Large Reich”.
  • to ensure the blooming of the reunified German people, it recommends the way of the teutonic Chevaliers: “to conquer by the German sword the ground where the German plow should make push corn for the daily bread of the nation”.
  • For that, it is necessary to rearm the country and to reach economic self-sufficiency by a series of territorial conquests.
  • the new rise of the German nation must be done in particular with the detriment of the Russian territories, of the Central European country and Danubian, but also in the west, the detriment of the France which he regards as “inexorable and enemy mortal of the German people”.

Plan and summary of the work

Divide into volumes first: assessment

Preface of the author (who dedicates the work to Dietrich Eckart, at least in the second edition)
  1. the House familiale
    Les years of childhood of Hitler where he tells his first agitations side-Germanists and his stubborn refusal (against the opinion of his/her father) to become Fonctionnaire, he dreams rather with a career of painter. The chapter finishes with the death of his/her father and his mother and her departure for Vienna.
  2. Years of studies and suffering with Vienne
    Cinq difficult years in Vienna where he saw odd jobs and of its trade of painter. First meetings with the Trade unionism and the National socialism.
  3. Considerations general policies touching my stay in Vienna
  4. Munich
  5. the world war
  6. Propaganda of war
  7. the Revolution
  8. the beginning of my political activity
  9. the Left working German
  10. causes the rout
  11. people and the race
  12. the first phase of the development of the working party German national-Socialist

Volume II: the movement national-Socialist

  1. Opinion philosophical and left

  2. the Prone State
  3. the State and citizens
  4. personality and racist design of the philosophical State
  5. Design and organization
  6. Fight of the first times - the importance of the word
  7. the fight against the red face
  8. the fort is more extremely when there remains alone
  9. Considérations on the direction and the organization of the sections of attack (SA)
  10. the federalism is only one mask
  11. Propagande and organization
  12. the corporative question
  13. the German policy of alliances after the war
  14. Orientation towards the East or policy of the East
  15. the right of self-defense

Conclusion

The French edition

In 1934, the Nouvelles Latin Editions - all news in fact, since they were founded in 1928 by Fernand Sorlot - publishes Mein Kampf in French. The work is brought back to only one volume of 688 pages; it is subtitle My Combat . Forward this sentence of the Marshal Lyautey: Any French must read this livre.

In the warning of the editors, Sorlot stresses that “delivers had on the sudden orientation of a whole people an influence such, that it is necessary, to find the analog of it, to go back to the Coran. ”

Hitler “having obstinately refused to let publish in French we thought that it was national interest ignore this refusal, whatever can be for ourselves and the young house which we founded the consequences of our initiative. ”

He still objects: The words and the public writings of a public figure belong to the public. and argues finally: Mr. Frick said this: " For the national-Socialists, the right it is what serves the German people. The injustice, it is what carries dommage." to him; We simply accepted responsibility for this vigorous définition.

Indicating that Hitler regards France as the main obstacle with its aimings, it quotes it: These results will be reached neither by prayers with the Lord, neither by speeches, nor by negotiations in Geneva. They owe the being by a war sanglante.

The editor, in addition, does not raise the very heavy threats of the book towards the Juif S and other populations which will be the subject of the Final solution.

The translation itself is integral and rather neutral, without notes nor comments.

The Bankruptcy court of Paris will make it prohibit with the sale the same year at the request of the German editor of Mein Kampf . This prohibition perhaps had an important effect on the preparation of the French to what was going to follow. After the war, Sorlot was condemned to twenty years of national Indignité to have published under the Occupation the Appels with the French of the marshal Pétain and other works collaborationnists. It still had with its credit the publication of works Antisémite S or Négationniste S.

In 1938, a translation is authorized with the Editions Beech. It is reduced, expurgée, even straightforwardly falsified. A sentence like: “France nation imperialist is the enemy mortal of Germany” becomes there “the border between Germany and France is definitively fixed. French people and equal German in right should not any more regard themselves as hereditary enemies but reciprocally respect themselves. ”

Some significant points of the book

The following items all are discussed in the book, but not necessarily in the same order.

  • Hitler starts by recalling that it was born with the border austro - German. It sees there a sign of the destiny which it must unify the people of Germanic language, more particularly than it must bring back German Austria to the German fatherland (incarnated by the German Reich of Bismarck), according to the principle that the same blood belongs to the same people . The German unification is seen like the prerequisite with the development of a policy colonial, itself condition of economic prosperity and demographic. When the territory of the Reich contains all the Germans, if it proves to be inapt to nourish them, of the need for these people will be born his moral right acquire foreign grounds. The plow will make place with the sword then, and the tears of the war will prepare the harvests of the future world .

  • At the time of a short assignment with Berlin (at the time in full food shortage) at the end of 1916, it “discovers” that “ the offices were crammed Jews. Almost all the secretaries were Juifs, and any Jew, secretary. I was astonished by this abundance by embusqués of the elected people and could not make differently than to compare their number with that of their rare representatives on the face ”. According to Hitler, the “Jews” are not only “funkers”, but still, they economically exploit the German people with their only profit and camouflage this activity while trying to cause the discord (Bavaria against Prussia, strike of the ammunition, etc).
  • On the organisational level, it does not hide its interest for the Catholic church on the one hand, and its hatred for the Jewish religion on the other hand, institutions which largely exceeded the thousand years of existence.
  • Hitler marks a particular admiration for the way in which the catholic hierarchy maintains its domination on the faithful ones: “by systematically denying the data of science which contradict it”, and while imposing altogether, would say one today, “his own reality”. The doctor Joseph Goebbels will retain this lesson.
  • On the other hand, it denounces the Christian vision of the world like pernicious and clean to weaken Germanic qualities.
  • It develops its theory of the fall of former civilizations: domination translates by extension territorial, which leads to the Métissage, which in the long term results in a “degeneration of the initial race”, then the decline.
  • It develops to with it also its vision of the Racisme: according to him, the “lower” people can hope to survive only while métissant themselves with the “higher” people, have obsession, and arrive of it to their ends when the latter are completely métissés, and do not constitute any more one danger to them. It is according to him what starts to occur in Europe, including in Germany. It is there an idea which could be found for example at Gobineau.
  • It tells the night when “the truth was done day in spirit” and where it “understood while crying until the morning that the Jewish people worked deliberately with the ruin of Europe, and Germany in particular”.
  • It announces its position on the relative reports/ratios of the party and propaganda: the more effective propaganda is and the less there will need to have members in the party, those being at the same time at the same time surer and easier also to supervise.
  • According to its book,
    • the handicapped individuals must be eliminated (active Eugénisme and not liability);
    • the “lower” people must be controlled to the “higher” people (of which German people);
    • any people “higher” other than the German people, if there are some, must also be to him eliminated without delay, because he constitutes a danger. The Métissage would be another way of neutralizing their danger in the long term, but it would be at the price of a loss of identity of the “Race”. It is necessary to prohibit the interbreeding and it is necessary that the threatened people eliminate the other ( note : the Shoah takes with this light a very different significance).
  • France is designated as an enemy to cut down for his operations anti-allemandes. In the same paragraph, Hitler precise: “If I were French, I would act besides exactly in the same way that them; but I am German”.
  • Another quotation: “Our vital objective is to crush France. It is necessary to initially gather all our energy against these people which hate us. In the destruction of France, Germany sees the means of giving to our people on another theater all the extension of which it is able”.
  • the former candidate at the School of the Art schools as awakes in him and affirms as of two things one:
    • if the impressionist see really the forest violet, they are sick and they should be hospitalized.
    • if they paint things which they can be false, they are swindlers and they should be locked up!

The reading of this book confirms the matter stated by Edward Morgan Forster: the First World War constituted a conflict of interest of people which shared all the same - in any case in Europe - the same values. Second is of very an other nature and constitutes a conflict of values, even of Civilization S.

Current legal status

In Germany, the Land of Bavaria (which inherited all the goods of Hitler) holds the royalties of the text and uses them to prevent the publication of complete and not-commented editions (Adolf Hitler having died in 1945, its work will fall into the public domain only in 2015).

This situation is at the origin of debates which oppose freedom of expression to the fight against the Racisme, or in which one presents the diffusion of the work like a means of fighting against the Nazisme: to diffuse the text would make it possible to better make known the contents of the Idéologie Nazi, and thus to better fight against it.

In France, the Court of Appeal of Paris decided, in a stop of the July 11th 1979, to authorize the sale of the book, taking into account its historical and documentary interest, but matching this authorization of the insertion at the head of work, just after the cover and before the title pages, of a text of eight pages warning the reader, in particular while recalling by which aspects the work “falls under the blow” from the law of July 29th 1881 modified by the law of July 3rd 1972 and in particular of what was at the time its article 23, the subparagraph 5 of article 24, subparagraph 2 of article 32 and subparagraph 3 of article 33 and while making follow this recall of the legal tendencies by a historical overflight of the misdeeds of the Third Reich.

With the Netherlands the possession of “Mijn Kamp” (Mein Kampf in Dutch) is authorized but not its sale, is prohibited since the end of the second world war, and is penally punishable since 1987.

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