After the Nazi Party’s poor showing in the 1928 elections, Hitler decided that the public did not fully understand his ideas. He retired to Munich and began dictating a sequel to Mein Kampf. It focused on foreign policy, expanding on the ideas of Mein Kampf and suggesting that around 1980, a final struggle would take place between the United States and the combined forces of Greater Germany and the British Empire…
In Hitler’s view, merely overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany to its pre-1914 borders was only a temporary solution. In Zweites Buch, Hitler stated his belief that Germany’s real problem was the lack of sufficient Lebensraum (“Living space”) for the German people. In Hitler’s view, only states with large amounts of Lebensraum were successful. In Zweites Buch, Hitler announced that overthrowing the “shackles” of Versailles would be only the first step in a Nazi foreign policy, whose ultimate objective was to obtain the desired Lebensraum in the territory of Russia…
Only two copies of the original 200-page manuscript were made, and only one of these copies has ever been made public. Zweites Buch was not published in 1928 as Mein Kampf was not selling well, and Hitler’s publisher informed him that having two books out would depress sales even further. By the time Mein Kampf started to sell well after the September 1930 Reichstag elections, Hitler decided that Zweites Buch revealed too much of his foreign policy goals. Kept strictly secret under Hitler’s orders, the document was placed in a safe inside an air raid shelter in 1935 where it remained until its discovery by an American officer in 1945. The authenticity of the book was verified by Josef Berg (a former employee of the Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag) and by Telford Taylor, the former Brigadier General U.S.A.R. and Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials. The book was neither edited nor published during the Nazi Germany era and remains known as Zweites Buch (lit. “Second Book”). The Zweites Buch was first discovered in the Nazi archives being held in the United States by the German-born Jewish American historian Gerhard Weinberg in 1958. Unable to find an American publisher, Weinberg turned to his Jewish mentor Hans Rothfels and his associate Martin Broszat at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, who published Zweites Buch in 1961 in German. Rothfels wrote the foreword to the 1961 edition. A pirated edition was translated into English and published in New York in 1962. The first authoritative English edition was not published until 2003 as Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf. It has also been published under the title “Hitler’s Secret Book”…
In contrast to Mein Kampf, in Zweites Buch Hitler added a fourth stage to the Stufenplan. He announced that, around 1980, the final struggle for world domination would take place between the United States and the now Greater Germany allied with the British Empire. Zweites Buch also offers a different perspective on the United States than that outlined in Mein Kampf. In the latter, Hitler declared that Germany’s most dangerous opponent on the international scene was the Soviet Union; In Zweites Buch, Hitler declared that for immediate purposes, the Soviet Union was still the most dangerous opponent, but that in the long-term, the most dangerous potential opponent was the United States…
Of all Germany’s potential enemies, Hitler ranked the United States as the greatest and most dangerous. By contrast, Hitler saw the United Kingdom as a fellow “Aryan” power that in exchange for Germany’s renunciation of naval and colonial ambitions would ally itself with Germany. France, in Hitler’s opinion, was rapidly “Negroizing” itself. In regard to the Soviet Union, Hitler dismissed the Russian people as being Slavic Untermenschen (“sub-humans”) incapable of intelligent thought. Hitler consequently believed that the Russian people were ruled over by what he regarded as a gang of bloodthirsty but inept Jewish revolutionaries. By contrast, the majority of Americans were in Hitler’s view “Aryans”, albeit Aryans ruled by what Hitler saw as a Jewish plutocracy. In Hitler’s point of view, it was this combination of “Aryan” might coupled with competent “Jewish rule” which was what made the U.S. so dangerous…
In Mein Kampf, Hitler rarely mentioned the United States and when he did, it was in a tone of deep contempt. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrayed the United States as a “racially degenerate” society on its way to self-destruction. By contrast, in Zweites Buch, Hitler portrayed the U.S. as a dynamic, “racially successful” society that practiced eugenics and segregation and followed what Hitler considered to be a wise policy of excluding “racially degenerate” immigration from eastern and southern Europe. What promoted the change in Hitler’s views between 1924 and 1928 is not known. By 1928, Hitler seems to have heard about the U.S.’ massive industrial wealth, the Immigration Act of 1924, segregation, and the fact that several American states had eugenics boards to sterilize people who were considered mentally defective, and was favorably impressed. Hitler proclaimed his admiration for these sorts of policies and expressed his wish that Germany would do similar things, albeit on a much greater scale.