Hitler's second book
Hitler's Second Book is an unpublished manuscript by Adolf Hitler that was written in 1928. It is a draft for a sequel to Mein Kampf , in which Hitler partly deals with new topics.
history
After the disappointing results of the NSDAP in the Reichstag election in 1928 , Hitler saw the reason for this failure in the insufficient public understanding of his ideas. He withdrew to Munich to dictate a sequel to Mein Kampf , which was primarily about foreign policy issues. The basis was still the worldview of Mein Kampf , from which Hitler concluded that there would be a final battle for world domination between the United States and the allied forces of Greater Germany and the British Empire around 1980 .
The origins of the second book can be traced back to one of the main questions of the 1928 Reichstag election. In South Tyrol , which came under Italian rule after the First World War , the Mussolini government had ordered a policy of forced Italianization against the will of the German-speaking majority of the population. Before the Reichstag election in 1928, the chairman of the DVP , Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann , expressed the view that a clear (diplomatic) defensive stance against the policy of Italianization could win votes. All political parties except the NSDAP shared this view , and they followed the example of Stresemann in trying to outdo each other with the strongest possible condemnations of the treatment of the South Tyroleans by Mussolini's government. When Hitler publicly admitted that Germany needed Italy as an ally and that the German government should therefore not take a position on the South Tyrol issue, he was sharply condemned by the other parties. Even in the leadership of the NSDAP, many had difficulties with Hitler's position. The second book should first explain Hitler's opinion that Germany should not take over the representation of the German-speaking population of South Tyrol.
Hitler also criticized Stresemann for his goal of returning Germany to the status quo of early 1914. According to Hitler, the mere revision of the Versailles Treaties and the restoration of the 1914 borders were second-rate problems. In the second book , Hitler declared the lack of " living space " of the German people to be Germany's most pressing problem, since he saw sufficient "living space" as a basic requirement for national greatness. The liberation from the "shackles" of Versailles could only be the first step of a National Socialist foreign policy, whose primary and ultimate goal must be to conquer new living space on Russian territory (cf. National Socialist European plans ).
Only two copies of the original 200-page manuscript were made. The second book was not published in 1928 because sales of Mein Kampf were sluggish and the Franz-Eher-Verlag let the author know that another book publication at this point would tend to hinder sales. When sales of Mein Kampf rose again as a result of the 1930 Reichstag election , Hitler found that the Second Book betrayed too many of his foreign policy intentions. On Hitler's orders, the manuscript was kept in an air raid shelter from 1935; it was discovered there in 1945 by an American officer. The authenticity of the book was vouched for by Josef Berg , the former RSK state manager for Bavaria and authorized signatory of the NSDAP's own Eher publishing house, as well as Telford Taylor , former brigadier general of the US Army and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials . In 1958 the historian Gerhard Weinberg discovered the book in a Nazi archive. He couldn't find a publisher in the USA and turned to his mentor Hans Rothfels and his colleague Martin Broszat at the Institute for Contemporary History , who published the book in 1961. Rothfels wrote a foreword. In 1962 an unapproved English translation was published; The first authorized translation appeared in 2004.
content
habitat
In the first two chapters, Hitler justifies the importance of the conquest of living space as a central motif of the National Socialist movement.
It starts with the “struggle for daily bread” as the basis of human society, from which the necessary correspondence between the population and the size of the living space of a people follows. When there is a disproportion, a people's degeneration and decline set in. He elevates the struggle for adequate living space to a central basic principle of human history. For Hitler, this struggle can only be fought militarily.
As alternatives to the struggle for living space, he sees birth control, emigration to reduce the population, increasing food production and exporting in order to be able to buy food.
He then rejects all of these alternatives. He rejects birth control and emigration as a weakening of the people. He sees the increase in food production as insufficiently feasible. He rejects export because it leads to an intensified struggle for sales markets with other nations and can therefore only lead to the situation in which Germany was in 1914. Hitler returns to these considerations in the following chapters and repeats them several times.
Foreign policy
The other chapters deal with the future National Socialist foreign policy, which serves the struggle for living space. As in Mein Kampf , Hitler declares the Jews to be his and the German people's eternal and most dangerous enemies in Book Two and outlines his political “step-by-step plan”. However, this term was never used by Hitler himself, but rather coined by the historian Andreas Hillgruber in his book Hitler's Strategy (1965). This plan contains three stages, the first of which should be the revision of Versailles and alliances with fascist Italy and the British Empire. In the second - in alliance with Italy and Great Britain - France and its possible allies in Central and Eastern Europe ( Czechoslovakia , Poland , Romania and Yugoslavia ) were to be overthrown in a series of lightning wars. Finally, the third stage would be a war to annihilate the Soviet Union that Hitler called " Jewish-Bolshevik " .
Compared to Mein Kampf , the “step-by-step plan” is expanded by a fourth level in the second book . If the Soviet Union was previously the main international enemy, the author now allows this to apply in the medium term, but at the same time sees the confrontation with the USA as the most dangerous enemy as inevitable in the long term. This “final battle” would take place around 1980, as described above. So between 1924 and 1928, Hitler's views of America had changed radically.
In Mein Kampf , the USA was only occasionally mentioned disparagingly as a "racially depraved" society, which was facing downfall. In contrast, the United States appears in Book Two as a dynamic, “racially successful” society that practices eugenics and racial segregation and operates exemplary immigration policies at the expense of “inferior” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. It is not known where this changed assessment between 1924 and 1928 came from. Historians have pointed out that Hitler was notoriously ill-informed about the world outside Germany and probably knew little about the United States at the time Mein Kampf was written. According to his own testimony, he had obtained his knowledge of America primarily from Karl May's western novels . This seems to have changed by 1928; Hitler will have heard of prosperity and industrialization in the United States as well as of the immigration law of 1924 , racial segregation and the fact that several states had eugenics authorities and practiced the forced sterilization of supposedly mentally retarded people. Hitler declared his admiration for such measures as well as his wish that Germany should pursue a similar policy on a larger scale.
Of all potential opponents, Hitler was considered to be the most dangerous. In contrast, he viewed the English as an " Aryan brother race" which - in return for Germany's renunciation of naval and colonial policy - would ally with Germany. France would weaken herself by mixing with foreign peoples. As for the Soviet Union, Hitler dismissed the Russian people as Slavic "subhumans" incapable of any intellectual achievement, with the Soviet government consisting of bloodthirsty but incompetent Jewish revolutionaries. In contrast, he describes the majority of Americans as “Aryans”, although they are ruled by a Jewish plutocracy . However, it was precisely this combination of “Aryan power” with “Jewish government” that made the USA appear so dangerous to Hitler.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Adam Tooze (2007): The Wages of Destruction - The Making & Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London, p. 13.
literature
- Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.): Hitler's second book . (= Sources and representations on contemporary history, volume 7). A document from 1928, with a foreword by Hans Rothfels. DVA, Stuttgart 1961.
- Hitler's Secret Book . Introduced by Telford Taylor. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Grove Press, New York 1962, OCLC 577790625 .
- Gerhard L. Weinberg (Ed.): Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf. Enigma Books, New York 2003, ISBN 1-929631-16-2 .
- Foreign policy determination after the Reichstag elections June - July 1928. Introduced by Gerhard L. Weinberg. Edited and commented by Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christian Hartmann and Klaus A. Lankheit. (= Hitler. Speeches, writings, orders). Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-22004-9 .
Web links
- English version from 1962 (PDF; 421 kB)