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Mein Kampff: Hitler's Master Plan - Part 1

© William Waller

If you are at the top and monarch of all you survey, where do you go next? One place would be the next higher mountain, so that you could survey a bit more! But, outside Germany, and for a great many inside, what Hitler intended to do next was still a mystery and, yet, they had a nearly complete guide right in front of them and we must now look at it.

Mein Kampff - My Struggle - was written in 2 volumes, the first in 1924 and 1925, part of it while Hitler was in prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. He did not actually write it but dictated it to his ever faithful Rudolf Hess. It is about 400 pages long and covers most imaginable subjects and some, but principally looks at the history of Germany, in a way, and some of the ways Hitler would change the future, if he had the power. The second volume was completed in 1927, again of about 400 pages covering another multitude of topics including the philosophy of the Party and more about Hitler's plans.

To read the whole book is difficult because, although the chapters have titles, there is a great deal of repetition and wandering off the subject. There is, also, a surprising amount of good political sense where Hitler, long before his time, argued cogently that democracy as practised in Western Europe then led inevitably to communism. While other politicians, or heads of government, might have suggested a wider franchise and greater accountability by parliament, Hitler pursued the other road, of advocating dictatorship for the good of the people! (As we have seen, he had already, before writing this book, introduced the Fuehrerprinzip into the Party, where he was the absolute leader.) In chapter 3 of Part 1, Hitler describes his own political self-education in Vienna from 1909 to 1913. At the time, he was extremely poor, and embittered at his failure to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he had hoped to become an architect. He lived from hand to mouth and, for whatever reason, he made a study of the political scene in the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire. It was not generally accepted that they were, in fact the last days, but the whole of politics was in such a state of flux that it could easily have afforded an education to even the most disinterested onlooker. From the policies and the successes, or lack of them, of the two main political leaders in Vienna in this period, Hitler deduced several lessons which he was to apply later. He saw that the reason for Dr Karl Lueger's success was that he constantly took care to ensure that the masses, the lower classes, were happy with his decisions or, at least, accepted them. In this way he became the Burgomaster of Vienna, an important and highly influential position in the capital of the Empire. Lueger's chief opponent was Georg Shoenerer, head of the Pan-German Nationalist Party, one of the earlier advocates of German nationalism. In driving for the creation of a truly German nation, the needs of the masses were overlooked and Schoenerer gained neither position in Vienna nor any significant advance in the cause of nationalism.

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