All of this is true. I know it’s inconceivable to todays youth that Jim Crow and segregation existed in the South and that the KKK went rampaging around blowing up and burning churches and burning crosses and lynching black people, but those things weren’t occasional rare occurrences they happened several times a week and were considered a regular part of life.
Similarly anti-Semitism was widespread throughout Europe in the early decades of the 20th century thanks to the publication of the Protocols of Zion by the Soviet Secret Police. Granted it had yet to take on it’s most virulent form ie; the Nazis, but the fact that it was walking around in the minds of the citizenry of Europe made it easy, well relatively easy for Hitler and the Nazis to take it and shake it up into something truly evil.
I don’t think this is true. In the UK, as the Queen’s own website freely admits, the monarch is above the law. Laws are enacted in her name, and cannot generally be used against her in a personal capacity. Probably this was true of most other modern, industrialized monarchies at the time. Granted, no British monarch in modern times has wielded anywhere near as much absolute power as Hitler did, but the fact remains that the practice of granting broad personal legal immunity from the law was not peculiar to Nazi Germany.
Anti-semitism in Europe AND the USA was widespread long before the protocols or any text. For Europe it goes back to Roman times.
Essentially up to 20th century you did not have a single christian family which had clear positive opinion of Jews. Of course like you said this did not amount to pogroms or “extermination” (although pogroms certainly did happen!), but there was just this feeling that Jews, like Gypsies and other such populations, were not to be trusted/dirty/etc.
In eastern Europe with the spread of communism resulted large antisemitism which still exists today (as seen in Ukraine unrest)
In the USA antisemitism was just as widespread as in Europe. Really up to the 60s mad men era, it was common for WASP co-workers to crack antisemitic jokes. (Hinted at in the mad men TV series).
GIs in WW2 were commonly antisemitic.
Again never to the levels that the Nazi propaganda turned it into, but classic Christian antisemites nonetheless. The so-called philo-semites were generally educated elites in USA, UK, Europe, not the Christian working class masses.
But again, its important to differentiate the Streicher-style antisemitism which is almost pornographic, and the classic educated or not Christian antisemitism.
Sorry to deviate from subject. But its interesting topic which has been distorted by the whole geopolitics of WW2 and the immensity of the holocaust.
But that doesn’t really work in a book, it just makes the writer come off as a crackpot. Hitler may have thought he was being all blood and thunder in the book, but he also saw the book as the cornerstone of the Nazis, what the flag would be planted on. That cornerstone needs to be sturdy and even dull and that certainly is true of most political cornerstones. The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are just as turgid as Kampf.
keep in mind that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf himself. He did dictate some of the book to Goebbels, but editing was minimal. In the case of his speeches while he would have some input, probably along the lines of “Don’t forget to put in at least 4 references to the Jew being subhuman vermin and trash and being responsible for Germany’s defeat in The Great War”, Goebbels and a team of speechwriters wrote his speech’s, even the ones for the small beerhall events.
Fair enough. I’m simply pointing out that my own, completely unfounded and perhaps ignorant, expectations were that the book would be inspirational-albeit-evil - because it is so often talked about as such. I expected more outrageous crackpottery, like the impression one gets from his speeches - in his flights of fist-waving rhetoric, he looks absolutely crazed (and yet, his audience loved it).
I was surprised, given his reputation for inspirational lunacy, that his book was so, as you put it, turgid. You give good reasons why it should be so, but I’m simply stating that I was surprised. It is unreadably boring.
Oh, Hitler was a dreadful writer, there’s no doubt about that. But you really can’t compare it to his speeches. As an orator the man knew his audience and he played them like a Stradivarius. Even his opponents confessed that Hitler was an incredibly gifted speaker.
Maybe if I were someone to whom his speeches appealed, I would also be more receptive to his writing. But they seem to me to be very similar, so neither work as far as I am concerned.
I guess I would class Herr Schickelgruber as an effective speaker rather than a good speaker - that is, his brand of Johnny One-Note appealed to his audience because he knew what they secretly wanted, or could be swept into believing, rather than any gift of expressing himself. Maybe his speeches benefitted from being delivered in an atmosphere of pageantry and goose-stepping and chanting and so forth, that the book didn’t have.
Yeah, I never got past the introduction either. I found fascinating the American translator’s explanation of the context of the Beer-Hall Putsch. It was not so much a crazy thnking he could take down the government with a crowd from a speaking hall. There was more too it. The western Rhur are (IIRC) was agitating for separation, and the general feeling was that the activists were egged on and financed by the French. As a result, there was an incredibly large resentment toward the WWI victors, with the belief they not only destroyed Germany in 1918 but were continuing to kick her while she was down. it’s not hard to see why this paranoid mentality would vote for someone who is promising to restore the greater glory of the vaterlandt.
No, it’s understandable, that one might think his book was full of the cra-cra, but I think Hitler was smart enough, and let’s be honest, he was smart, to know that if he DID go full or even semi crackpot in the book, it and he would be dismissed. The writing of memoirs by politicians has certainly changed and there some very few who were very good writers and orators, like Churchill, but nowadays you have ghostwriters and teams of speechwriters to punch everything up.
All that said, without Goebbels and his talents I have some doubts as to whether Hitler would have gone so far.
Not a hijack, you make some good points. As I wrote in an earlier post Hitler trained himself and was trained in the art of making speeches and becoming a great orator.
Your last sentence is very telling, the typical Nazi rally would have several speakers before Hitler, who would warm up the crowd and get them surging higher and higher emotionally, but also tamping them back down. There was also the usual flag processions and such.
Then STARTIME.
Hitler steps to the podium. Except, he doesn’t start speaking. He stands there, simply looking around at the crowd, maybe glancing down and touching the his speech which was placed at a table next to the podium.
When he does start to speak, it is in a quite, slow calm tone. No gestures at all except to sweep the hair on his head back. Gradually he starts to build and build and get louder and louder and the gestures and body movements become more and more flamboyant. The crowd’s emotional level, already primed, starts building and building and building again, and Hitler takes them to an even higher even more frenzied peak than they were before.
A dangerous peak. If he told them to do so they would have stormed out of the building and torn the nearest synagogue down with their bare hands. At this point Hitler would make a decision to either take the crowd even farther or to bring them back down.
And NONE of it was spontaneous. He would practice speeches for days and had his gestures photographed and filmed and analyzed and tie specific gestures to specific points in his speeches. It was truly masterful.
Quite true – I should have been more precise in my wording. I was referring to things like this (from Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Chapter 24, A Turn of the Tide):
Hmmmm, I recall reading a couple of books for and being told by the professor in my WWII class in college that Goebbels helped write the book, at least taking dictation, but that, the class and books are 20 years ago. With Hess, if he did help I’m surprised the book isn’t more crackpot given what Hess did during the war.
Minor correction: the Protocols were written by the Tsar’s Secret Police, not the Soviets. They were first published in 1903, and then banned by the government in 1905, when it was found to be a fraud. (Not that that stopped people from taking them seriously, of course)
That brings up an intriguing question, were there ANY agents who managed to survive all of the various purges and serve in the various incarnations of the Czar’s Secret Police, NKVD, KGB, etc?
As an aside it’s also extraordinary to me that people took the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion seriously and Herr Hitler was able to use it to great effect (and some still do) when even in 1921 it was known as a fabrication. Especially when it blatantly rips off Maurice Joly; seems to me like if someone got hold of say, War of the Worlds, used find and replace to replace ‘Martian’ with ‘Frenchman’, say he found it in a secret French meeting and having it taken seriously by people 100 years later. I just can’t get my head around it.
On the editor; this was done by Friar Bernhard Stempfle who himself fell victim to the Nazis in 1934’s Night of the Long Knives - either because he ‘knew too much’ (about Hitler’s niece) or for criticising SS General Weber, or both. On topic, Weber was apparently the only one who could make fun of Mein Kampf in the presence of the Fuhrer.
ETA; The part Jewish (!) Emil Maurice also took down the dictation, along with Hess.
One of my co-workers talked about his meeting with Hitler. This guy said he seemed to be a very nice, charming fellow.
(The guy was a student in Berlin before the war. A bunch of them bought rush seats for the opera, and were given the VIP box because nobody took it. Then Hitler and his entourage showed up and the last minute and they had to get out. Hitler stopped and talked to them for a minute, apologizing for messing up their night.
But then, Hitler never apologized to Poland or Czechoslovakia)
(Not that that stopped people from taking them seriously, of course)