(projector rattling)
- [Lisa] Whilst many may
easily dismiss his words
as the ramblings of a madman,
the reality is that Hitler came to power
and brought devastation, destruction,
and the largest genocide in
the course of modern history.
(people shouting in foreign language)
- [Lisa] The centenary of the
publication of "Mein Kampf"
is an opportune moment to remind ourselves
that vigilance is necessary
to prevent the rise of
extreme political movements
and autocratic leaders
representing dangerous
and indeed murderous ideologies.
(people shouting in foreign language)
- [Guy] Nazism ultimately
is a political religion,
and all religions have their
books, their holy books,
and "Mein Kampf" is Nazism's holy book.
- This was all very careful
manipulation of the masses,
and he was very good at that.
- The language in "Mein Kampf"
is violent, it's incoherent,
it's nasty, it's divisive,
and it's unpleasant.
It is a work of utter
monomaniacal narcissism.
(dramatic music continues)
(music fades out)
(projector whirring)
People who revere Hitler,
people who read "Mein Kampf"
and think it's a great book
are deluded, evil, nasty, bigoted,
and their thinking should
have no place in any society.
(people shouting in foreign language)
- Extreme nationalist ideas of
the type expressed in "Mein Kampf"
are not uncommon today.
- I'm here for in memoriam,
I'm here for the future,
I'm here for the (indistinct) as well.
For 1,000 years and for
1,000 years to come.
- All for white power!
(ominous music)
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
- "Mein Kampf" sets out an
abhorrent and pernicious ideology.
The words are distasteful,
violent, strong, and graphic.
But illustrative of a man who
needed to be taken seriously.
(Nazis shouting in foreign language)
- There was no doubt that
the German population
knew exactly what was going on,
but the German population
was cowed, it was living in fear,
and it felt that there
was nothing it could do.
- And that was the danger,
that he wasn't taken seriously.
They underestimated him,
they failed to take him seriously,
or they simply believed
that those ideas could never
be translated into action,
that they were just rhetoric.
And I think of course that
was a fundamental error
in the way that "Mein Kampf" was viewed
and the way in which
Hitler was viewed too.
(people shouting in foreign language)
(ominous music)
(ominous music fades out)
- The mood in Germany at
the end of World w*r I
was that of a humiliated and
defeated people and nation.
This fight had been
going on for four years.
Millions of people had died
and no one had got anything
or no one had got anywhere.
Those responsible for it
were people like Hitler's
claims of Jews and Marxists
and basically anybody who
had signed the armistice
that ended the fighting.
(ominous music)
In the early 1920s, Germany was in a mess.
There's no other word for it.
There was economic upheaval,
there was political turmoil,
there were revolutions taking
place all over bits of Germany,
and we are approaching a
time of absolute chaos.
This is very, very fertile
ground for extremist politics.
- The political situation in
Germany in the early 1920s
was very much a reflection of
social and economic problems
generated by the First
World w*r and its aftermath.
The new Weimar democracy
had to deal with quite a lot of threats
from both the extreme political left
and the extreme political right.
One of the myths that circulated
at the end of the First World
w*r, particularly put about
by these extreme radical
right-wing groups,
was the stab in the back myth.
So this was the idea that actually,
if they'd been left to conclude,
the German army would've been
successful on the b*ttlefield.
So this kind of whole myth
grew up in the postwar period
and then of course there
was a lot of resentment
that came about as a result
of the Treaty of Versailles.
Perhaps the most important
was the w*r Guilt Clause,
so this was Article 231,
which placed the blame or the
responsibility for the w*r
upon Germany and Germany's allies.
In addition, the Treaty
of Versailles took away
quite a lot of Germany's territory
as well as her overseas empire too,
so there was kind of quite a lot
of nationalist resentment against that.
And I think one of the parts
that really rankled the most with Hitler
was the clause in it
that said that Austria,
so that was Hitler's homeland,
and Germany should not
be able to be unified.
Hitler hated that and
very much saw his mission
to actually tear up the
Treaty of Versailles
to achieve the union, the Anschluss,
between Austria and Germany.
(ominous music continues)
- You have to remember that Adolf Hitler
and the National Socialist
German Workers' Party,
the n*zi Party, were just
one of many right-wing groups
that were springing up all over Germany.
(ominous music)
(projector rattling)
We think of it today as this
kind of colossal figure.
Back then, he was just the leader
of what was just a fairly
fringe minor party.
People would've seen them as
being somewhat cranky, extreme,
obsessed with Jews, obsessed with Marxism.
In the early 20s, Hitler and the
Nazis were just another bunch
of the lunatic fringe.
- It was completely unremarkable
until a combination of
events and circumstances
pushed it into a position
of political prominence.
The party started out
its life called the DAP,
the German Workers' Party, and
changed its name to the NSDAP,
the National Socialist
German Workers' Party.
From that time and Hitler's early
association with the movement,
and again, particularly his speeches,
which started to get him
quite a lot of interest
and fame in the party
in those early years.
So these were the things that
started to make the difference.
Hitler also maneuvered
himself quite early on
to become the party leader.
He ousted the original two party leaders
and became leader very quickly
and also then very quickly introduced
the party's program and
also the party's newspaper,
the Volkischer Beobachter,
and also the party's
paramilitary wing as well.
The Storm Troopers, the SA.
And these things were important
because all the existing
parties had their own press,
had their own paramilitary wing,
and so really what the
n*zi Party was doing
was kind of announcing its arrival.
(ominous music continues)
- In 1923, Hitler asked for the help
of a general for the First World w*r,
a man called Erich Ludendorff.
And he says to Ludendorff,
"I want to have a coup
and I wanna take control violently."
And this becomes known
as the Beer Hall Putsch.
- A putsch is an attempt to overthrow
an existing governmental system.
So tending to be something
that's kind of quite a
highly guarded secret,
kept hidden until the last moment
and so that it can have more impact.
But essentially the main
aim is to destabilize
and indeed to overthrow
an existing government.
And that's what Hitler
attempted in November 1923.
(ominous music)
- The Munich Beer Hall Putsch
became one of the key components
in the Nazis' mythology
or legend, if you like.
Actually, even though it
was venerated by the Nazis,
it was a disaster.
It was a complete c*ck,
there's no other word for it.
- [Lisa] On the 8th of November, 1923,
together with a band of his
closest comrades and bodyguards,
he stormed into the
Burgerbraukeller in Munich
where the State Commissioner
for Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr,
was holding a meeting.
- You have Hitler and various senior Nazis
going to this beer hall
where all these
politicians were assembled.
Hitler strides in, fires
a revolver in the air,
climbs onto the stage,
and basically kind of
arrests, if you like,
these three major political figures
and says, "If you don't work
with me, I'm gonna sh**t you,
and I'm now in charge."
You know, it's all very well
to get on the stage in
a beer hall and say,
"I'm the king of the world,"
but actually you've gotta go
out and radiate your power.
And so by the kind of
early hours of the morning,
after lots of dithering
and humming and harring,
Hitler says, "Well, we've
gotta march somewhere,
so why don't we march into Munich?"
And they say to the three
guys they've arrested,
"Do you promise not to run away?"
And they go, "Yeah, we
promise not to run away."
And as soon as the Nazis
walk out the building,
those three politicians run
away and they tell, you know,
the local police, the local armed forces
to resist this, you know, n*zi putsch.
And that's exactly what happens.
Hitler, Goring, various
other senior Nazis,
they're walking through Munich
and then suddenly there's this g*n battle.
It only lasts 30 seconds.
But during it, Hermann
Garing, a very senior n*zi,
is shot in the leg.
Quite a few Nazis are actually shot dead.
Some local police are shot dead.
It's just chaos.
- Hitler was also injured,
he dislocated his shoulder,
yet he was sort of bundled
into the back of a getaway car
and taken to the country house,
the estate of his friend,
Ernst Hanfstaengl.
So he kind of hid out
there for a couple of days,
but then the police caught up with him,
and on the 11th of
November he was arrested
and brought to trial for treason.
(ominous music)
(projector clicking)
Hitler used the trial really
to gain as much publicity as he could
for his movement and for his party.
- For most people, going on
trial for mounting an insurrection
would represent a bit of a problem.
For Hitler, it represents
a massive opportunity.
This is a showcase for
Hitler and, you know,
it's a place for him to get on
the stage, he loves the stage,
and tell the world as well as
the court, you know, his views.
And so this is it, it
becomes a platform for him
that actually, rather
than shutting Hitler up,
it actually gives him more voice.
- So Hitler was placed in what
was known as fortress confinement
at Landsberg Prison.
And in fact, despite
the five-year sentence,
he served less than a year.
And during that time, it was, again,
a kind of relatively lenient
kind of imprisonment.
He was in a relatively light
and airy cell, quite comfortable.
He could spend a number of
hours each day outside his cell,
he could decorate his cell.
It's kind of quite a privileged
imprisonment, one could say.
The seeds of the history of the n*zi Party
were planted very much in
those days that Hitler spent
at Landsberg Castle.
And an important part
of the reason for that
is that it was here that
"Mein Kampf" was born.
- "Mein Kampf" is a book or two books
written by Adolf Hitler in 1925
when he was in Landsberg Prison
and also partly written when he
had left and published in 1926.
Those two volumes together
are known as "Mein Kampf,"
and that means "My struggle."
In it, Hitler performs two functions.
First of all, it's autobiographical.
It's his struggle through life
to get to where he is today.
And it's also his political
manifesto and his views of the world
and how he sees the world and
how he sees the world should be.
And in it he makes no doubt
about various positions
that he wants to take
when he is ruler of the world.
It is a work of utter
monomaniacal narcissism.
It's also almost completely unreadable
and almost nobody in the world
has read all of "Mein
Kampf" from cover to cover.
- It's been widely believed
that he dictated this book
to his fellow prisoners,
Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice,
during those months of
imprisonment in 1924.
However, more recently
there's been some sense
that maybe he actually
typed up the words himself
on a typewriter that he had in his cell.
Either way, what came
out was "Mein Kampf",
published in 1925 by the
publisher Franz Eher Verlag
which became the Nazis Press
and which was run by Max Amann.
And he was the one who'd
sort of suggested to Hitler
to write this book to
give him something to do.
Hitler thought that with his
career very much at an all-time low
being placed in prison at this
point, that by writing this book
maybe he could earn
some money, for a start,
and secondly, that maybe
he'd be able to get his ideas
more widely known as well.
- Hitler loved to ramble.
He loved to go on and on and
on, and some of his fellow prisoners
would just get really,
really annoyed by the fact
that he would always be lecturing them
and telling them this and that.
And so actually some people
suggest that actually he was,
you know, suggested he
could do "Mein Kampf"
just as a way to give some sort
of focus to all these ramblings.
- The other really important reason
that Hitler had for writing this book
was to imprint his
leadership on the party.
So it was written very much for
his followers to follow him,
and then that kind of group of followers
then became an expanded group
as he became more and more
popular through the early 1930s
and then of course once he
came to power in January 1933.
(ominous music)
(projector rattling)
- Hitler outlines a lot of
kind of policies, if you like,
if we can dignify them
as such, in "Mein Kampf."
But the three big ones are these.
First of all, it's a desire
to eradicate Bolshevism,
Communism, Marxism,
whatever you wanna call it.
You know, he doesn't like the left.
- [Announcer] Even as they rejoiced,
the chains of sl*very were
slipping around their necks.
Lenin's communism was not designed
with the individual's freedom in mind.
- He also wants to get rid of the Jews.
He sees Jews as being an
evil virus, if you like.
I mean, he always talks
about 'em as a kind of,
as a sort of like a bacteria.
And also he wants to create
what he calls Lebensraum,
living space for the Germanic people.
He thinks that Germany
should be a major world power
and have lots more space
for Germans to live in,
and he looks around the European continent
and sees where German-type
people are living
and thinks that more and more Germans
should inhabit those spaces.
And so what you're looking at here
is a work published in the mid-20s
that told the world
exactly what Hitler wanted.
He wanted to get rid of Jews, he
wanted to get rid of communists,
and he wanted Germany to
invade other countries.
(gentle music)
(projector rattling)
- The very first sentence reads,
"Today, it seems to me providential
that fate should have
chosen Braunau on the Inn
as my birthplace."
As this small town was
situated on the border
between Germany and the Austrian Empire,
this sort of led Hitler to believe
that he had some kind of
messianic purpose in life,
that he had this God-given mission,
a nationalistic mission.
So from this very early date,
Hitler's already talking about
the union between his
homeland, Austria, and Germany.
So it's essentially Pan-Germanism
and it was nothing short
of bringing all Germans,
all German speakers
into the same territory,
the same geographical unit.
He also more generally very much dislikes,
even hates the Habsburg Empire,
so the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and what it represents.
He believed that the Germans' rights
were sort of being suppressed,
whereas he regarded that the
empire was being slavicized,
so that the rights of the
Slavic peoples were being raised
at the expense of the Germans'.
He didn't like at all
the multi-nationalism
or the multi-ethnicity of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And essentially he just didn't
like the way that it worked,
and most importantly
he didn't like the way
that it was separate from Germany.
(projector rattling)
- In "Mein Kampf,"
Hitler outlines his
autobiography, essentially,
and the key years are those he
spends as a young man in Vienna
where he is a young man who
had wanted to go to art school,
if you like, and failed to get in.
He was bitter, he was
destitute, he was, you know,
living, you know, on a
kind of hand-to-mouth,
very much day-to-day basis.
And in "Mein Kampf" he
talks about his awakening
of what he will begin to be
calling the Jewish problem.
(ominous music)
And he says, you know,
"Initially I had no beef,
if you like, with Jews.
We had a Jewish boy in our class
and we were just a bit wary of him."
So, you know, mild antisemitism.
But that antisemitism really
gets picked up in Vienna
because he starts reading
anti-Semitic journals,
anti-Semitic, you know, newspapers,
and he starts getting
basically infected by it.
And like so many other people,
he looks at Jewish people and thinks,
"Actually, these people
don't really belong here.
Sometimes they dress differently.
They worship in a different way.
They seem to be very
commercially successful,
and I'm not, so therefore
it's their fault."
And it's in Vienna
where he really picks up
this really virulent antisemitism.
That's a really, really
key part of "Mein Kampf."
- Hitler's antisemitism is expressed
probably as the biggest
theme in "Mein Kampf,"
so it's the one that comes up the most.
So if you looked in the index
for the word Jew or Jews,
that's the one that
literally comes up the most,
so it's the biggest topic,
it's the biggest theme,
and we know that his personal
antisemitism became central
to state policy once he came to power.
(Hitler speaking in foreign language)
(crowd cheers)
(people shouting in foreign language)
- He talks about them as
the destroyer of culture.
So not only he says do they not
have anything to contribute,
but they actively destroy
existing cultures,
and obviously he's mainly
talking about Germanic culture.
Same thing in terms of blood,
he talks about racial
miscegenation or racial mixing.
If they've been mixing with what
he regarded to be pure Germans
and this racial mixing took place,
then this would have an
impact on the next generation,
which in his view would be
regarded as inferior and tainted.
- It's possible to look
at "Mein Kampf" and go,
"Ah, the Holocaust starts here."
Hitler talks about, you know, eradication.
He talks about, you know,
ending the Jewish problem.
What Hitler doesn't
say in "Mein Kampf" is,
"I'm going to have a
network of death camps
in which I'm going to gas Jewish
men, women, and children."
It's never explicit.
It's very hard to look
at "Mein Kampf" and go,
"Yes, that is a blueprint for genocide,"
'cause the wording's ambiguous.
- According to Hitler in "Mein Kampf,"
"It was the sacred mission of
the German people to assemble
and preserve the most
valuable racial elements
and raise them to the dominant position."
He also wrote, "All who are
not of a good race are chaff,"
and this gives us the idea
that they're expendable.
And Hitler ascribed
international significance
to the elimination of Jews,
which he wrote in "Mein Kampf,"
"must necessarily be a bloody process."
And so, whilst we've said that
the whole plan for the Holocaust
was not there at this stage,
we kind of see the seeds there
and we see the ideology there from 1924.
And this needed to be taken
seriously, and I think it wasn't.
(projector rattling)
(lively music)
- [Announcer] Moscow's Red
Square is ablaze with banners
for the arrival of Joseph Stalin
who leads Russia's millions
in the 15th anniversary celebration
of the birth of the Soviet Union.
High Russian officials enter the square
as the Moscow Garrison's Honor
Guards stands still at attention.
Stalin, Red Russia's man of the hour,
mans the Lenin's Mausoleum
to watch the celebration.
- One of the important
key themes in "Mein Kampf"
is Hitler's hatred of communism
or Bolshevism or even socialism,
anything of those ideas
of the political left
he absolutely hated.
(lively music)
In "Mein Kampf,"
he described Marxism as a
doctrine of destruction.
And this was something that
permeated his ideas and his policies
right through into the waging
of the Second World w*r
against the USSR, regarded as
the archenemy ideologically.
- [Announcer] For six long years,
every Russian worker has been told
that Hitler's Germany was
the Soviet Union's deadliest
and most dangerous enemy.
(projector rattling)
- Hitler had no original ideas of his own.
What Hitler was very good at
doing was absorbing other ideas
and presenting them as, you
know, his own personally,
as if he had this sort of
kind of messianic ability
to sort of lead the world
with his original thinking.
(Hitler shouting in foreign language)
(crowd cheers)
(crowd cheering)
- What he was very, very influenced by
was a lot of, you know,
anthropological and racial science
that was washing around since
the end of the 19th century
in which it was fundamentally believed
there were huge differences
between the races
and some races were
better than other races,
and the worst thing you could
do was to marry and reproduce
with someone from a different race
because that would
contaminate your own race.
So this whole idea of racial
purity, not Hitler's idea,
but he takes on board.
Hitler also learn some
medical thinking at the time
as well as racial hygiene
is this idea of eugenics,
is this idea that you've got
to kind of breed healthy,
you know, biological human stock.
What Hitler's doing
is taking strands that were in
medical thinking at the time
and politicizing them.
- Hitler was already
talking in "Mein Kampf"
about the need to sterilize those
who were not regarded to be
kind of the greatest value
to the German nation.
And of course, once
the Nazis came to power
during the wartime period,
they put into place the
policy known as Aktion T4,
or Operation T4,
which was essentially the mass m*rder
of the asylum population in Germany,
so the mentally and physically ill.
(projector rattling)
- [Announcer] Are exhumed for autopsy.
90,000 are buried here.
15,000 who died in a lethal
gas chamber were cremated
and their ashes interred.
Death books found hidden
in the wine cellar
of the Hadamar institution
revealed part of the story
of the mass killings.
The bulky volumes contained
thousands of death certificates.
"Profession unknown, nationality unknown"
was written after each name.
(soft somber music continues)
(projector clicking)
(projector rattling)
- [Lisa] Whilst Hitler's
personal antisemitism
is perhaps the most widely known
and indeed the biggest
theme of "Mein Kampf,"
Hitler's fundamental
aim to destroy democracy
was also central to his thoughts
as outlined in "Mein Kampf"
and to his actions in practice.
(Nazis shouting in foreign language)
- Hitler absolutely excoriated
the existing political system,
and this is abundantly
clear in his writing.
He wrote that decisions were made
"by a majority of ignoramuses
and incompetence."
He described parliamentarians
as "mentally dependent non-entities."
And I think that one of
the important lessons
we need to take from this
is that actually these were written down,
they were there for people to
see from this very early date.
- Germany in the 1920s was
a place where democracy
really did not have a firm footing.
The Weimar Republic, as it
was known, was quite weak.
People looked at democracy,
and Hitler was one of them,
looked at democracy and thought,
"This is failing, this
isn't working here."
Whereas countries like Britain
had mature democracies,
although women only had
the vote very recently,
certainly there were a hell
of a lot more Democratic
and the democratic institutions
had sort of bedded in,
there was a maturity there.
But Hitler looks at democracy and thinks,
"Actually, this is weak, it's
flabby, it's not the way forward."
He looks at communism,
he thinks it will sort of
basically eradicate German culture
and the German way of living.
He doesn't think that's a way forward.
So of course, before he's even
really heard of the word fascism,
he is going down that path of a
kind of authoritarian leadership
and kind of treating a country
like today a business would be run.
Businesses aren't run like democracies.
They're run by, you
know, an apex of leaders
and they tell their employees what to do.
That's how Hitler thought
countries should be run.
Not a place where, you know,
the people at the bottom,
the voters could tell
the leaders what to do
and get rid of them.
He thought, "No, once I'm in
power, I'm there for 1,000 years."
(crowd cheers)
"Mein Kampf," after
it's published in 25-26,
it's not a runaway success.
It doesn't attract huge sales.
And so I think that people, you know,
look at "Mein Kampf" at the time and go,
"Well, it's a bit crazy,
it's a bit incoherent."
And Hitler actually in later years
comes to be a bit embarrassed by it
and just regards it as nothing more
than what should have been a series
of kind of articles or columns
for the Volkischer Beobachter,
the People's Observer,
one of the n*zi newspapers.
- This quickly changed in 1930
when the n*zi Party made huge gains
in the parliamentary elections,
and then the sales of "Mein
Kampf" increased enormously
because people wanted to
see what he was all about.
Once in power, of course,
then there was kind of quite
a lot of pressure by the party
for a much wider readership.
(crowd cheering)
In 1933, the year that
Hitler came to power,
1.5 million copies were sold.
And then the state started to recommend
that all public officials
should have a copy of the book.
From 1936, a copy that was put together
and called "The People's Edition,"
which had both volumes
bound together into one,
was presented to all newlywed
married couples on their marriage.
Also, businesses gave
out copies of the book
for good performance,
so kind of as a kind of
incentive for hard work.
And deluxe versions were
also made available,
and in 1936 too there
was a braille edition.
Now, how many people
actually read "Mein Kampf"?
We don't know.
What we do know is that it made
Hitler personally very wealthy.
This personal wealth
allowed Hitler to purchase
and to later very lavishly
decorate the Berghof.
(ominous music)
(projector rattling)
Of course, "Mein Kampf"
was not the only important
and influential political text.
We can think about several others.
And one very important one, of course,
was "The Communist Manifesto,"
published in 1848, written by
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
So this was the manifesto
of the Communist Party
and became a very influential
tract upon communists
in all the periods thereafter.
You know, starting with Lenin
in his overthrowing of Tsar Nicholas II
and setting up the
dictatorship of the proletariat
and setting up the initial Soviet Union,
and then followed on even more
pragmatically, one could say,
by Stalin in his years
as ruler of the USSR.
I think also important, of course,
was what was known as
"The Little Red Book,"
so "The Quotations of Chairman
Mao Tse-tung" in China.
This was published in October 1966,
which was the year of
the Cultural Revolution,
which had wide ranging
ramifications on Chinese society.
Now this book was published in
different kinds of editions.
It's kind of quite well known
as "The Little Red Book,"
it is a little red book.
It had many quotations,
all these kind of keywords
and phrases of Chairman Mao.
The most popular edition,
in fact, was pocket size,
so the idea was that the party faithful
could and should indeed have a
copy of "The Little Red Book"
with them at all times
so they could recite from
it, they could learn from it,
they could practice from it.
And that was the purpose
and that was the function.
And really it was designed
to impact the lives
of each and every Chinese citizen.
We've also got North Korea's
monolithic system of thought.
This was called "The 10
Principles for the Establishment
of a Monolithic Ideological System,"
and these were principles
that guided the governance
and the behavior of the
population of North Korea.
First published in 1974,
it called for absolute
loyalty and obedience
to the ideas of Kim Il Sung
and then later his
successor too, Kim Jong Il.
(people shouting in foreign language)
The similarities of these
other texts to "Mein Kampf"
obviously was that they were
very important political treatises
that had far reaching influence
upon the followers of those movements
in the USSR, in China, and in North Korea.
- But I think "Mein Kampf"
of all those kind of political bibles
is unique 'cause it's autobiographical
in a way that some of
the others simply aren't.
It's also unique 'cause it's a
really, really terrible book.
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
(Nazis repeat in foreign language)
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
(Nazis repeat in foreign language)
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
(Nazis repeat in foreign language)
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
(Nazis repeat in foreign language)
(n*zi speaking in foreign language)
(Nazis shout in foreign language)
- You've gotta remember
that extremist politics
and extremist parties
are run more like
religions than, you know,
sensible political parties.
Nazism is a political religion
and "Mein Kampf" is its Bible.
And because they're like religions
and because they require
faith and zeal and fervor,
their leader is often portrayed
in kind of messianic, demigod-like terms.
And so the n*zi propaganda
machine under Joseph Goebbels
makes Hitler into this demigod figure.
- There really was this idea
that Hitler had already
established much earlier on
about having this mission
or this God-given duty
really to save Germany
from all of its problems,
social problems, economic
problems, and political problems.
(ominous music)
- At these rallies, you know,
he's at the center of thousands
and thousands of people.
He walks through the crowds
from behind to address them
and they turn around and look at him.
You know, everything is about theatrics
to make him look like a demigod.
- The whole image of the
Fuhrer as the great leader
obviously started out
as leader of the party,
but then came, once Hitler came to power,
to be the Fuhrer of the
whole nation as well.
And so in this, his position
was obviously very powerful
and his word was the last word.
(ominous music)
A key quote in "Mein Kampf"
in regard to German youth was this.
"He alone who owns the
youth gains the future."
And so Hitler was absolutely
determined, so even from 1924,
to secure the future of Germany
and to secure the future of his party.
And all of this he believed he could do
through the attraction
that the party could exert
upon Germany's youth.
So he saw the youth as absolutely crucial
to the future success of both
the party and the nation.
(youth chanting in foreign language)
- Hitler saw children as
being absolutely vital
for keeping himself in power,
because he knew that if he
could sort of, you know,
mold the thinking of
the younger generation,
they were gonna be with him forever.
Hitler sees the Third Reich
in thousands-of-year terms,
and where better place to start
than working on the adults of tomorrow.
Mold their mind, teach them in
schools the rightness of Nazism,
and they'll be with you forever.
(canons booming)
- [Announcer] German g*ns, German bombs.
(planes whirring)
(siren blaring)
(bombs booming)
(a*tillery booming)
(tank whirring)
- World w*r II of course became
not just a w*r of military might,
but one of ideals too.
And that was because the
Allied powers were determined
to fight the good w*r against
the aggression and the dogma
of the Axis powers, fascist
Italy, n*zi Germany, and Japan.
- It was an ideological
battle against two things.
Against Bolshevism and against the Jews.
Those two things he
felt threatened humanity
as much as we today feel, you know,
climate change threatens us.
You know, that was what Hitler thought,
that's how he saw communism and the Jews,
he saw them as basically
the end of humanity.
(ominous music)
"Mein Kampf" was written by
Hitler and it's his book.
And after the collapse
and after Hitler's death,
the Allied powers saw "Mein Kampf"
as something that could
potentially be used
by Neo-Nazis as a kind of,
you know, sort of sacred text.
And so of course its publication,
reprinting was banned
by the occupying
authorities, by the Allies.
- The Allies agreed policies
at the wartime conferences
at Yalta and Potsdam to
denazify and demilitarize Germany,
and also to reeducate the Germans.
So of course, in line with that policy,
they were absolutely determined
to remove all copies of "Mein Kampf"
and particularly to prevent any
republication of "Mein Kampf".
The Allies transferred
the book's copyright
to the German state of Bavaria
under the condition that
reprints would be banned.
Knowing that the expiration
of the book's copyright
would come at the beginning of 2016,
the Institute for Contemporary
History in Munich,
a very well-regarded research center,
made plans for the publication
of an annotated critical
edition of "Mein Kampf."
So they did this really
to prevent the publication
of any less well-intentioned versions,
by which I mean those by Neo-n*zi groups
or anti-Semitic individuals or groups.
Obviously this was a very
controversial decision
and it did meet with some concerns,
and particularly among
the Jewish community.
Although the publication was
to some extent controversial,
I think it's an important one
and I think it's important
because if we use it carefully
and use it for educational purposes,
then that can only be a good thing
to prevent the rise of
ideologies and ideologues.
- Believe in national socialism.
- We can't get away from
the fact of its existence
and we have to understand
that Hitler used those ideas
to absolutely abhorrent policies
of destruction, w*r, and genocide.
- [Announcer] The waning
weeks of the European w*r,
the world sees proof of acts of
savagery unparalleled in history.
- He was underestimated,
he wasn't taken seriously.
And we have people in the world today
who have perhaps similar kinds
of ideas or different ideas
but certainly extremist ideas,
and perhaps the lesson
we can learn from this
is that they shouldn't be underestimated
and they should be taken seriously.
(soldiers chanting in foreign language)
- There are places
similar to Hitler's regime
all over the world.
To different extents, but you
only have to look at Russia,
you only have to look at Belarus,
you only have to look at China,
you only have to look at North Korea,
and that's just for starters.
It's still with us, it's still with us.
Hitler was, you know,
the absolute embodiment
of that form of totalitarianism,
but it hasn't gone away.
(crowd cheering)
(ominous music continues)
"Mein Kampf" is always gonna
be popular to Neo-Nazis,
cranks, loons, idiots,
racists, anti-Semites.
Now having a copy of "Mein
Kampf" for these idiots
is gonna be a little
badge of honor for them,
like a swastika tattoo.
(people shouting in foreign la)
You can't get rid of it.
You've just gotta accept
the fact it's there.
It's a malign influence
on people, frankly,
who are already lost to
sensible, reasonable politics.
(crowd cheering)
(projector clicks)
(gentle music)
(singing in foreign language)
(singing in foreign language continues)
(music fades out)
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Mein Kampf: An Autopsy of Evil (2024)
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