There isn’t any book which captures the mind of Adolf Hitler more deeply that the book written by himself- “Mein Kampf” and to put it in perspective, Mein Kampf is considered as the Bible of National Socialism a.k.a Nazism.
While “Mein Kampf” simply means “My Struggle”,Adolf Hitler initially thought of naming his book as Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit when translated to English is “Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”.
But his Business minded Nazi Publisher Max Amann thought it was a bad idea.
Max Amann was the then manager who looked onto Nazi Publications and later set up the biggest publishing house in Germany solely by the proceeds received from the of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Max Amann simply felt the long title to be “Unsalable” and later persuaded Hitler to change the title to “Mein Kampf” which was felt more short and compelling.
Mein Kampf was a blockbuster during the Nazi regime,Only the bible could hold up with the sales of Mein Kampf .
While it seems that Mein Kampf had a perfect run,It did not.
Max Amann during the first year of sales exaggerated that the book was sold well over 23000 times,It was later found to be an exaggeration after the Allied forces found out the Royalty statement of the book in 1945 (The same year Hitler did the best thing he ever did in his life–Shooting himself in hie head)
It was later on revealed that the book could just sell over 9400 copies in it first year and dropping to as low as 7600 in 1929–which was considered fairly low for a book which despised the word “unsuccessful” although the book sales plummeted to One million when Hitler took over the country in 1933 making him the most prosperous author in Germany (Basically JK Rowling of his time).
And when the World War II broke out,Mein Kampf sold over 6 million copies in Germany.
Another interesting stuff was that it became a routine to present a copy of Mein Kampf to the bride and groom at their wedding, and every children was presented a copy of Mein Kampf after their graduation.
I would argue that “Mein Kampf” is one of the most important literal texts of the previous century.
Many prominent leaders do not have their own writings condensed into a book and hence we simply can’t know what their true intentions were.
With “Mein Kampf” we can simply learn that Adolf Hitler was not an insane man,But he was a man who simply was so intelligently cruel that would make Satan run for his money.
