Hitler

afford in 1933 to refuse his Reich Chancellor’s salary (in contrast, he pointed out, to his predecessors):
Mein Kampf
had made him a very rich man.
    No policy outline was offered in
Mein Kampf
. But the book did provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising statement of Hitler’s political principles, his ‘world-view’, his sense of his own ‘mission’, his ‘vision’ of society, and his long-term aims. Not least, it established the basis of the Führer myth. For in
Mein Kampf
, Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead Germany from its existing misery to greatness.
    Mein Kampf
gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichean view of history as racial struggle, in which the highest racial entity, the aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. ‘The racial question,’ he wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture.’ The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the ‘blood Jew’ had, ‘partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish
literati
and stock-market bandits’. The ‘mission’ of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time – a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperialist conquest – this would provide the German people with the ‘living space’ needed for the ‘master race’ to sustain itself. He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility and quasi-messianic commitment to an ‘idea’, a set of beliefs that were unalterable, simple, internally consistent, and comprehensive, gave Hitler thestrength of will and sense of knowing his own destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with him. Hitler’s authority in his entourage derived in no small measure from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully express. Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians’, the self-reinforcing components of his ‘world-view’ meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of opponents. Once head of state, Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ would serve as ‘guidelines for action’ for policy-makers in all areas of the Third Reich.
    Hitler’s book was not a prescriptive programme in the sense of a short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a mistake in treating
Mein Kampf
with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established and rigidly upheld political principles. Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written. Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’). Hitler’s ‘world-view’ in
Mein Kampf
can now be more clearly seen than used to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between his entry into politics and the writing of his ‘Second Book’ in 1928.
    On Hitler’s central, overriding, and all-embracing obsession, the ‘removal of the Jews’,
Mein Kampf
added nothing to the ideas he had already formulated by 1919–20. Extreme though the language of
Mein Kampf
was, it was no different to that which he had been proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers and speakers on the
völkisch
Right, extending well back beyond the First World War. His bacterial imagery implied that Jews should be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination. Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating ‘racial tuberculosis’ through removal of the ‘causal agent, the Jew’. And there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in