Inked in blood: the chilling resurgence of Mein Kampf

Hitler’s odious book, with its endless distorted references to biology and race, is now a century old. But John Kampfner has found a popular revival of its core message today

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For 80 years, Germany has done everything it can to stamp out all vestiges of Nazism. It has told itself and the world that it, and only it, could have meted out such horror. The notion of Sonderweg, the special path, is deeply embedded. According to this reading of history, Germans followed a straight line from Bismarck to Hitler. We Brits love to hear this kind of thing: those pernicious Huns.

We, by contrast, would never have succumbed.

But having had the dubious honour of spending the last few months immersing myself in Mein Kampf, which was published a century ago next week, I am more convinced than ever that we are deluding ourselves. The same blithe overconfidence applies to Americans (indeed, pretty much anyone). We are all prone to the most dangerous propaganda, extremism and hate, no matter where we come from.

Before embarking on this assignment for a BBC radio documentary, I had never read Mein Kampf. No sensible person, apart from a history scholar, would have done. For me, it was a particularly unpleasant prospect given that my Jewish father fled Czechoslovakia shortly after Hitler had marched in, and several members of his extended family were killed in the concentration camps.

In Germany, the book has been taboo, subject not just to legal copyright restrictions (new versions could not be printed), but also to social shame. However, from India to Turkey and beyond, it has done a healthy trade around the world.