Hitler's Mein Kampf (translated loosely as My Struggle), was penned by Hitler in the ancient walls of the prison fortress
at Landsberg am Lech, Germany, where he would spend thirteen months of an original five year conviction for high treason, in his failed attempt to stage a coup against the then in-power Berlin government.
Foreshadowing the title of his book, Adolf Hitler penned these words in his diary shortly after his conviction for treason: "The trial of common narrow-mindedness and personal spite is over- and today starts My Struggle, Landsberg on 1 April 1924."
As a politician, Hitler was more at home with oratory than with literary skills, as he mentioned in the preface, "I know that men are won over less by the written word than by the spoken word, and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers."
With this principle in mind, Hitler proceeded to pour into his book, in a gushing torrent, all his political beliefs, his irrational prejudices and hatreds, and his twisted theory of Aryan superiority. Mein Kampf was to be the definitive statement of Hitler's view of life and the world- he did not intend to waste the opportunity.
After three and a half months of labour in his political prison by Hitler, he finally delivered the manuscript to Nazi publisher Max Amann. What he received was a badly written and disjointed political and personal philosophy, lacking any real structure or style. At Amann's insistence, a crew of Nazi figures took hand in revising the text. Together they corrected Hitler's grammar, reorganized his arrangement of topics, and toned down some of the more objectionable passages.
In the final account of Mein Kampf that we read today, Hitler's point of view was one of Aryan supremacy, achieved only by cleansing the German race as it existed then of Jews and other inferior races. One of the most outrageous, and as we know today, untrue point of view in the work was that Jews caused the downfall of Germany in the first World War, which was a humiliating defeat for the Germans. Hitler used a weapon for this purpose- money. The German banking industry then was controlled by Jews. Hitler declared that the Jews perpetrated an international banking conspiracy: in the war, Jewish bankers in Germany and elsewhere made large loans of money to nations on both sides of the war, and thus, neither side could become powerful enough to triumph. As the war progressed, the Jewish conspirators began tightening Germany's credit so that its flow of money gradually dried up. Without adequate financing for its war machine, Germany had little hope of winning the war.
In this excerpt for Mein Kampf, it reveals Hitler's extreme and unconditional hatred of Jews:
"If at the beginning of the war, and during the war, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
In more ordinary times, these wild accusations might have had little effect on the German people, but we have to consider that Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s was a proud, nationalistic society that had been reduced by the World War I to licking its wounds and searching for excuses. Because of their difference, financial prosperity, and professional successes, the Jews were an easy target for suspicion, jealousy and blame. The outcome was that the German people, looking for someone to blame for their debilitating loss, were only too willing to believe Hitler's twisted view. Thus the Jews had become the inevitable scapegoat for Germany's loss in WWI and everything else that was wrong in Germany.
In another of these lines from Mein Kampf, Hitler clearly defined the relationship between the Jew and the Aryan: evil versus good; the subhuman versus the s