# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is the best known and most popular Nazi text ever published with over 12 million copies sold from 1925 to 1945.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Part 18 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Hitler, Mein Kampf, A Critical Edition," includes about 3,500 annotations by a team of scholars and historians. Credit... Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

BERLIN - The dual-volume doorstop of a meticulously historically annotated version of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was one of Germany's best-selling works of nonfiction last year, its publisher said on Tuesday, announcing that it would bring out a sixth run at the end of the month.

Originally published in the 1920s and banned for seven decades in Germany, the new version, " Hitler, Mein Kampf, A Critical Edition," spent 35 weeks on Der Spiegel's best-seller list and sold about 85,000 copies, according to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.

The success of the critical and annotated version, it said, was proof that the attempt by a team of historians to annotate, criticize and contextualize the original much-reviled work was worth it. The project had been planned to follow the expiration at the end of 2015 of a 70-year copyright held by the state of Bavaria and stirred controversy during the three years it took to complete.

"We are very happy that the ambitious bridge between fundamental academic work and historical-political explanation appears to have succeeded," said Andreas Wirsching, the institute's director.

Mr. Wirsching said that publication of the work spurred more than five dozen discussions at museums, memorial sites, schools and churches examining the edition, which included 3,500 critical, historical annotations to the original, and showed the level of public interest and countered fears it would fuel neo-Nazi sentiment.

"On the contrary, the discussions about Hitler's worldview and dealing with his propaganda presented an opportunity - at a time when authoritarian political beliefs and far-right slogans are again gaining in popularity - to re-examine the ominous roots and results of such totalitarian ideologies," Mr. Wirsching said.

The decision to bring out a new edition of a work that advocated an Aryan "master race" provoked fierce debate before publication. One side argued the new work was an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany.

The other insisted it would only encourage nationalists and xenophobes at a time when the country was engulfed in its own debate about refugees and the threat posed by foreigners.

Because most orders are handled through booksellers, the institute said it had been unable to compile statistics on exactly who had bought the 2,000-page edition. But based on reporting by German regional and local newspapers, the buyers do not appear to be far-right extremists or other radicals, it said.

"By and large it appears to be customers who are generally interested in politics and history, as well as people who are active in political education, such as teachers," the institute said in a statement.

Despite more than 30 queries for translation rights, the institute said it planned to bring out editions only in English and French.

The Nazi leader's manifesto, which first appeared as two volumes in 1925 and 1927, was banned in Germany by the Allies in 1945 and had not been officially published in the country until the annotated edition was brought out last year.

Also last year, a Leipzig-based publisher of right-wing books began selling a reprint of Hitler's original work, leading state prosecutors in Leipzig and in Bamberg to begin separate investigations into whether they could press charges for violating laws forbidding propaganda.

Prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday, but the publisher, Der Schelm, was advertising a second edition of its publication on its website.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Germany's Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of 'Mein Kampf'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BERLIN - The dual-volume doorstop of a meticulously historically annotated version of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" was one of Germany's best-selling works of nonfiction last year, its publisher said on Tuesday, announcing that it would bring out a sixth run at the end of the month.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On this day in 1939, World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Each Monday, this column turns a page in history to explore the discoveries, events and people that continue to affect the history being made today.
Aside from the Bible, few books over time have stirred up such controversy as one composed from the cell of a German prison.

It is a poorly-written mess, according to literary critics, but the ideas contained within Adolf Hitler's 1925 tome "Mein Kampf" (or My Struggle) sadly would resonate well beyond the book's quality of prose.

Mein Kampf was the manifesto from which all of Hitler's atrocities stemmed, a tinderbox of a book that may have disappeared from the annals of history had the author not actually gone on to carry out the ideas presented in his tirade against all things non-German.

Because he did, however, the notorious book remains banned in some parts of the world, more than 80 years later, and has sparked ongoing debates about literary freedoms.
Hitler passes the time behind bars
Hitler rose through the ranks of Germany's small but powerful National Socialist (Nazi) political party to become its bombastic leader in the early 1920s. Believing that Germany's central Weimar government had let the country be ridiculed by a series of post-World War I punishments handed down by the victorious Allies, the Nazis attempted a coup d'etat in 1923. The famous "Munich Beer Hall Putsch" failed and sent Hitler to jail for high treason.

While imprisoned, Hitler read piles of books on history and philosophy, consolidating his own set of beliefs all the while. He didn't consider putting his political ideas down on paper, however, until his business manager suggested that an autobiography might be a fruitful way to pass the time in prison. At the urging of his manager, Hitler's original title for his work, "Four Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice," was also changed to the more marketable "My Struggle." Hitler did not, in fact, write the book himself, but dictated to his friend Rudolf Hess, who was imprisoned alongside him.

Part autobiography, part political manifesto, the patchwork pages of "Mein Kampf" were put to print in 1925. By that time, Hitler had already been released from prison upon growing pressure from members of the Nazi party.
A gift for the newly-married couple
Despite being repetitive, long-winded and difficult to read, "Mein Kampf" had become a popular read throughout Germany by the late 1920s, disseminating Hitler's main theories to a large audience.

In "Mein Kampf," the future chancellor of the Third Reich goes on at length about his youth and the early days of the Nazi Party, but it was his visions for a Germany of the future that resonated most with its readers.

Chief among his ideas was the absolute, innate superiority of the Germanic race, which Hitler called Aryan, over every group of people. "Mein Kampf" singled out Jews as the source of many of Germany's ills and a threat to Aryan dominance. The Aryans had a duty to restore Germany's former glory and enlarge its territory by winning back the land it had during World War I and gaining new area by expanding into Russia.

"Mein Kampf" gained enormous readership in the early 1930s and once Hitler gained power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, became the de facto Nazi bible. Every newly married couple received a free copy on their wedding day, and every soldier had one included as part of his gear. At the outset of World War II, the book had been translated into 11 languages and sold 5 million copies.
The debate goes on today
"Mein Kampf" was a clear-cut warning to the world of Hitler's intentions for war and genocide, which may have been recognized and prevented had more people read it outside of Germany, some historians say. Publishers in the United States and the U.K. did produce copies in English prior to the War, but were held up by copyright lawsuits by Hitler's publishers.

Since the war, the book has remained a flashpoint of controversy, especially in Germany and the former Axis nations.

Worried over its use as propaganda by neo-Nazi groups, Germany and Austria have banned the possession and selling of "Mein Kampf" outright, while some countries restrict its possession to people using the book for academic purposes only. Opponents of the ban argue that the book is a valuable historical document, and that keeping it unavailable only makes it more desirable to right-wing groups.

The debate over the book's ban has flared up again in Germany in recent months, with some groups calling for an edition carefully annotated by academics to be produced before 2015, when the book's copyright officially expires in Germany and it will become available to anyone in the general public to own and reprint.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On this day in 1939, World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Each Monday, this column turns a page in history to explore the discoveries, events and people that continue to affect the history being made today.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.

The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler's particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract " Mein Kampf " (or "my struggle"), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan," and with the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party's status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany's supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000-just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an "Aryanization" of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass" in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, starting World War II. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler's SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution) to "the Jewish question."

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and urged the German leaders and people to follow "the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples"-the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide. Germany's formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz, the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat."

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust-known in Hebrew as "Shoah," or catastrophe-were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust's bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people's responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.
Sources
The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum.
What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums.
Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe.
Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Holocaust: Definition, Remembrance & Meaning - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, Romani people, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime from 1933-1945.

# data[].attributes.body
After deep thought and lots of paragraphs of propaganda, Hitler comes to the conclusion that all Jews are disgusting and the one Jew he saw was no German, but a 'rotting piece of filth'.

# data[].attributes.body
After seeing the Jew, Hitler begins to wonder if Jews are the 'chosen people' and if so, why.

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler becomes more Anti-Semitic, comparing Jews to a maggot in a rotting body, along with other disgusting metaphors.

# data[].attributes.body
One time, Hitler was strolling through the Inner City and sees a strange person and begins to wonder if he is a Jew or German. This troubled him greatly.

# data[].attributes.body
At the time, Hitler was getting more and more interested in politics, and he started following current events, such as the struggle carried against William II.

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler comes back to Vienna, seeing more and more Jews, filling him with more and more hate.

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler joins this organization, but instantly he hates his colleagues, and constantly argues with them to the point where he goes to work at a different building.

# data[].attributes.body
After going to a new building, Hitler examines his co-workers for at least two hours, trying to figure them out.

# data[].attributes.body
Growing up, Hitler never really heard the term 'Jew', but eventually he learned about it along with politics, giving him a slight distaste whenever it came up.

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler is also interested in politics, and read and studied a lot in that subject. Hitler thinks that some people who read are unable to organize and register the material they have taken in. Hitler states that "They lack the art of sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that which is without value, of retaining the one forever, and, if possible, not even seeing the rest, but in any case not dragging it around with them as useless ballast. For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end."(35)

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler loved music and painting. He could read and draw late into the night, and never grow tired. He states "Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would become reality after all, even though this might require long years. I was firmly convinced that I should some day make a name for myself as an architect." (35)

# data[].attributes.body
In the years 1909 and 1910, Hitler's situation had changed as he no longer had to earn daily bread as a common laborer. By this time he was working independently as a small draftsman and a painter of watercolors. Although it still was barely enough to live on, he says that "it was good enough for my chosen profession." (34)

# data[].attributes.body
For five years Hitler struggled to earn a living, first as a day laborer, them as a small painter, all of which never sufficed to appease his daily hunger. Hitler states that "Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had, share and share alike." (21-22)

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler attempts to find a job, but finds himself more as a casual laborer, out on the street trying to find something to do. Hitler states that "The 'skilled' worker does not find himself out on the street as frequently as the unskilled, but he is not entirely immune to this fate either." (26)

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler realizes that he could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building schools at the Technik, and you also needed a high-school degree. He had none of those.

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler goes to Vienna to get accepted into the Academy, and Hitler is so convinced that he will be accepted that he went to the rector to ask why he had been rejected. The rector assures Hitler that "the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of architecture." (20)

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler mentions that "I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved." (18) Hitler is faced with the problem of having no parents, and with a heart of indomitable will, Hitler moves to Vienna in hopes of becoming something.

# data[].attributes.body
Concerned over Hitler's illness,  his mother finally allowed Hitler to withdraw from the Realschule and let him attend the Academy. Hitler considers these days the "happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain." (18) Two years later, his mother dies, putting an end to Hitler's dream.

# data[].attributes.body
When Hitler is 13, his father died from a stroke of apoplexy. Hitler mourned his father's death, but quickly moved on. His mother carried on his father's wish for Hitler to become a civil servant. However, Hitler is diagnosed with a serious lung ailment, and a physician advises his mother to "never to send me into an office." (18)

# data[].attributes.body
Hitler is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, and he blurts out that he wants to become an artist. His father, however, does not like this, saying "Artist, no, never as long as I live!" (9)

# data[].attributes.headline
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Orange Boooks International, 2019.

# data[].attributes.subject
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Orange Boooks International, 2019.