Originally published in:

Editorial Section, page 4, 1 May 2012 Tuesday, Gangtok-edition


Re-availability of “Mein Kampf”: Reviewing Discretions

A 25 April 2012-report by Gareth Jones and Alice Baghdjian of ‘Reuters’ regarding Bavarian state government’s decision to use excerpts from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiographical “Mein Kampf” (‘My Struggle’) on German school curriculum from 2016 onwards has generated controversies all over the world.

Though aware that contents of the book, which also contain Hitler’s political ideology, are easily available on internet, critics of the decision are scared that an official decision to revoke the 67-year-old ban on “Mein Kampf” would not only lead to the re-Nazification of European culture in the long run but also might attract inquisitive youngsters to the Austrian-born German military leader’s ultra-nationalistic ideas. However, both the German Jews and the English intellectuals have welcomed the move, including the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History’s preparations to publish an annotated version of the text, so that the maturing individuals could read and identify the erroneousness and perversities of the Second World War-German Führer and desist themselves from following the ‘suicidal philosophies of narrow nationalism, racism, megalomania, and xenophobia’.

In the 21st century, when history carefully remoulded and propagated by victorious Allies after the 1939-45 war has come to be re-examined, and the Allied bombing of Dresden (February 1945), Berlin (November 1943), Rome (May-July 1943), and the twin Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945) are being considered war crimes just like the Nazi blitzes of London (September 1940-May 1941) and Rotterdam (May 1940), this brouhaha regarding the official republication of Hitler’s autobiography is understandable. Undoubtedly, young Germans reading “Mein Kampf” would be exposed to the anti-Semitic ravings of Hitler (1889-1945), but some rather unpalatable issues regarding the conception of the German military general’s 1925 publication are bound to be rekindled as well. In India, where “Mein Kampf” is almost uninhibitedly sold in English translations, the criticism of the Bavarian government’s decision will induce in conscious readers an urge to review the years of their own domination by the English. The unalterable conclusion that Hitler and his Nazi cronies like H.W. Göring (1893-1946), J. Streicher (1885-1946), P.J. Goebbels (1897-1945), and H.L. Himmler (1900-1945) among others drew Germany to exhaustive destruction because of their erroneous expansionist and exterminatory policies notwithstanding, both the Germans, all of whom are most often censurably identified with the Nazis by readers – the Allied views having had been inculcated upon them – and the Japanese, who are almost always held responsible for initiating the Second World War with complete obliviousness being adopted to the the-then foreign policies of appeasement followed by the European leaders especially of France and England, had helped the Indians in their own ways in their struggle against the annihilatory English colonialism. Subhas Chandra Bose’s ‘Indian National Army’ personnel were strategically and tactically supported by the so-called ‘Axis’ forces against the English who would often embark upon genocidal tactics against the subaltern, and these facts require remembrance when any Indian self-guardedly approaches “Mein Kampf” for its intrinsic defects and depravities. The best scenario for Indian readers would be to dismiss the implausibility and errors of “Mein Kampf” without forgetting that when Hitler began dictating the first of the 782 pages of “Mein Kampf” to Rudolf W.R. Hess (1894-1987) at the “Landsberg Prison” in the summer of 1924, during his incarceration following the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” of Munich (8-9 November 1923), the post-Great War “Treaty of Versailles” (signed on 28 June 1919) had demanded war reparations of 132 billion Papiermarks from the vanquished Germany, it was taking 4.2 trillion Papiermarks to purchase an American dollar, millions of Germans were unemployed and helpless, and the French forces had occupied the Ruhr area of North Rhine-Westphalia because the defeated country could scarcely pay back the belligerence-damages.

Edited by Bernhard Stempfle and published by Max Amann, head of the “Franz Eher Verlag”, “Mein Kampf”, which was initially titled “Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”, is divided into two volumes consisting respectively of twelve and fifteen chapters. Continuously and erroneously focussing on the ‘Jewish peril to the German state’, this rabidly-anti-Semitic publication, which would also partially contribute to its author’s miserable fall, debates on globalists versus continentalists, and also on intentionalists versus functionalists. Other than mentioning then necessity of the “National Socialist Movement” in a ‘decadent and suicidal’ Weimer Republic, “Mein Kampf” also discusses the problem of lebensraum for the Garman ‘Aryans’ in a ‘country infested with the Jews’ – a very dangerous point which would ultimately lead to the ‘Holocaust’, or the genocidal annihilation of approximately six and a half million Jews. So, while “Mein Kampf”, which sold over six million copies in Germany in 1940 alone, remains a dangerous propagandist publication, it also has associations of German’s post-1914-18 War miseries with its conception and sales.


– Reported by: Pinaki Roy; Balurghat, 29 April 2012.