Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 661331aa6fb82c42 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Lebensraum: Hitler's Search for More German Living Space. The geopolitical concept of Lebensraum (German for "living space") was the idea that land expansion was essential to the survival of a people. Although the term was originally used to support colonialism, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler adapted the concept of Lebensraum to support his quest for German expansion to the east. Key Takeaways: Lebensraum. In Nazi ideology, Lebensraum meant the expansion of Germany to the east in search of a unity between the German Volk and the land (the Nazi concept of Blood and Soil). The Nazi-modified theory of Lebensraum became Germany's foreign policy during the Third Reich. Who Came up With the Idea of Lebensraum? The concept of Lebensraum originated with German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), who studied how humans reacted to their environment and were especially interested in human migration. In 1901 Ratzel published an essay called "Der Lebensraum" ("The Living Space"), in which he posited that all peoples (as well as animals and plants) needed to expand their living space in order to survive. Many in Germany believed Ratzel's concept of Lebensraum supported their interest in establishing colonies, following the examples of the British and French empires. Hitler, on the other hand, took it a step further. Hitler's Lebensraum. In general, Hitler agreed with the concept of expansion to allow the German Volk (people) to survive. As he wrote in his book, Mein Kampf : However, rather than adding colonies to make Germany larger, Hitler wanted to enlarge Germany within Europe. Adding living space was believed to strengthen Germany by helping solve internal problems, make it militarily stronger, and help make Germany become economically self-sufficient by adding food and other raw material sources. Hitler looked eastward for Germany's expansion in Europe. It was in this view that Hitler added a racist element to Lebensraum. By stating that the Soviet Union was run by Jews (after the Russian Revolution), Hitler concluded Germany had a right to take Russian land. Hitler was clear in his book Mein Kampf that the concept of Lebensraum was essential to his ideology. In 1926, another important book about Lebensraum was published—Hans Grimm's book Volk ohne Raum ("A People without Space"). This book became a classic on Germany's need for space and the book's title soon became a popular National Socialist slogan. Why Did Hitler Write 'Mein Kampf'? From 1925 to 1945, more than 12 million copies of Adolf Hitler's semi-autobiographical screed "Mein Kampf" (in English, "My Struggle") were sold worldwide and translated into 18 different languages. After World War II, as humanity struggled to process the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust, Hitler's best-seller was banned from respectable bookshelves and lurked in the popular imagination as the most dangerous and taboo of texts. In 2016, an annotated critical edition of "Mein Kampf" was reprinted for the first time since the end of the war in Germany on the day that its original copyright expired. Its release triggered heated debate over the merits of reading "Mein Kampf," even in a heavily annotated edition that actively calls out Hitler's lies. One fierce critic of the book's release, the historian Jeremy Adler from King's College London, wrote that "Absolute evil cannot be edited," echoing the verdict of many scholars and historians that "Mein Kampf" wasn't worth reading for any reason. "It's not a book that people read, including experts on Nazism," says Michael Bryant, a professor of history and legal studies at Bryant University (no relation) who wrote a book on Nazi war crimes but had never opened "Mein Kampf" before 2016. "There are not that many people who write about it and even fewer people who have actually read the damn thing." Bad Ideas, Worse Writing. As a historian, Bryant decided it was high time he read the "primary source" of all Nazism for himself. "How often do you have an 800-page book written by a political criminal of Hitler's stature?" he asks. The German 2016 critical edition ran more than 1,700 pages with all of its scholarly commentary, but Bryant says it wasn't the extensive footnotes that made "Mein Kampf" a "slog" of a read. "Hitler's not a scholar and he's not a writer," says Bryant. "His writing is so baroque and turgid and suffers from a lack of organization. If a student of mine wrote like Hitler, the red ink would be dripping off the page. 'You need a transitional sentence here! Too obscure! Too vague!'" When Did Hitler Write "Mein Kampf"? Hitler wrote the first of his two-volume book in 1924 while imprisoned for a failed political coup. His right-wing National Socialist (Nazi) party had been banned and 35-year-old Hitler decided to use his jail time to plan his triumphant comeback. With "Mein Kampf" he hoped to consolidate the splintered right-wing movement in Germany and become its hero. In the preface of "Mein Kampf," Hitler laid out the purpose of the book, which was part political diatribe and part personal memoir (notice that even in the preface, he bristled at the influence of "the Jews"). "I decided to set forth, in two volumes, the aims of our movement, and also draw a picture of its development," wrote Hitler. "At the same time I have had occasion to give an account of my own development. in so far as it may serve to destroy the foul legends about my person dished up in the Jewish press." Magnus Brechtken is the deputy director of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, the German research institute that published the 2016 critical edition of "Mein Kampf." Brechtken says that Hitler's purpose for writing "Mein Kampf" was to present himself as the person who had discovered the "key to history," which is that history is above all the struggle between different races. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler writes that: In his dense and meandering prose, Hitler fills both volumes of "Mein Kampf" with his racialized view of Germany's history and his program for its purified future. If, that is, the German people recognize the Jew as their enemy and Hitler as their savior. "Hitler believed that he was the 'chosen one' to save Germany from racial destruction and the only person who had the political power, will and ruthlessness to see his program through," says Brechtken. "'I am your last chance,' he told the German people in 'Mein Kampf.' 'We are our last chance.'" Did Hitler Invent the Racist Ideologies in "Mein Kampf"? Brechtken and Bryant agree there was nothing particularly new about the twisted, anti-Semitic worldview Hitler put forth in "Mein Kampf." The idea that Central European "Aryans" were the superior race was popularized in the 1850s by Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, a French diplomat and armchair ethnologist who wrote the influential "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races." According to Gobineau, everything good in human civilization was created by the Aryans, the "purest" of the white races, and has been defiled through intermarriage with "inferior" blood. Next came Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born music critic who respected the German composer Richard Wagner as much for his rabid anti-Semitism as his operas. In an 1899 book, Chamberlain forwarded the idea that all of history was a clash between the Aryans and the "Semites," and that only "Germanism" could rescue the world from the grips of Jewish conspirators. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler parroted Chamberlain's conception of the Jewish people as the chief opposition, writing, "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew." According to Hitler, Jews were "parasites" who fed on the Aryan culture before undermining its superior Aryan instincts with "Jewish" concepts like Marxism and humanistic thinking. All the while, Hitler insisted, the Jew was plotting to dilute the purity of Aryan blood. "With satanic joy in his face," wrote Hitler, "the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people." Anti-Semitism is ugly on its own, but when Hitler was in Austria, he also learned how to employ anti-Semitism as a political tool. Rejected from art school, young Hitler peddled postcards in the streets of Vienna, where he absorbed the rhetoric of the Austrian politician Georg von Schoenerer. Von Schoenerer wanted to see the creation of a "Pan German" state that absorbed the Germanic parts of Austria, and he successfully used the Jews as both a scapegoat and enemy of his cause. When Germany lost World War I, Hitler and other German nationalists blamed the defeat on "back-stabbing Jews," Marxists and other leftist elements in German politics.