Adolf Hitler’s long, part-autobiographical book, Mein Kampf, is one of the most notorious books of the 20th century. Yet it was not his only book.
Three years after Mein Kampf, he dictated a second one, which was never published in his lifetime.
The so-called second or secret book was discovered by chance in 1958 among captured German documents in the United States, and published in German and English in 1961.
Now, more than 40 years later, a new edition and translation of the manuscript is to be published by Enigma books as Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf.
Translated by Krista Smith, the book is introduced by Gerhard Weinberg, the distinguished American historian who, as a young researcher, first unearthed the manuscript and recognised its significance.
In the time between its first publication and this new edition, the second book has largely been ignored by everyone save the occasional academic historian. Hitler is popularly regarded as a one-book author.
The second book is in many ways more important than Mein Kampf, which is cluttered with a great deal of unreliable testimony about Hitler’s own past.
When Hitler dictated his second book (he seldom wrote anything down himself) in the late spring of 1928, he wanted to sort out his ideas about a very big issue not really discussed in Mein Kampf — the centrality of warfare in human affairs.
In the second book Hitler made completely explicit his view that the modern capitalist world economy had no future. The answer to the economic development of a state like Germany — rich in human potential, but poor in resources — was to seize land and raw materials from other people, so-called ”living space”.
Hitler’s world was derived from a vulgar Darwinism: the struggle for existence was the only reality for nations and races, and warfare the expression of that struggle.
More clearly than ever, Hitler sketched out the worldwide struggle against the Jews that he and his party had to lead.
The fruits of this warped view of historical reality were the wars of economic conquest and racial imperialism unleashed from 1939, and the terrible path to genocide.
To read the second book is to gain an exceptional window into the mentality of a man who saw warfare as both natural and necessary, and whose economics was a rudimentary belief in the superiority of naked power.
It is easier to explain what Hitler was doing in the 1930s by reading the second book, but, unlike Mein Kampf, it remained a secret.
Hitler was poised for his political breakthrough when he wrote it in 1928, and perhaps judged that the extraordinary candour of his remarks made publication electorally risky.
The republication of the second book is long overdue. If Hitler had bothered to give it a catchy title, it might never have gone out of print. — Â