Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

by Volker Ullrich

“It will always remain one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich,” wrote Victor Klemperer in LTI, his 1946 analysis of Nazi language, “how this book could have been disseminated throughout the public sphere, and how nonetheless Hitler achieved his twelve-year rule. The bible of National Socialism was in circulation years before his rise to power.”103 Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had spelled out with exemplary clarity everything he intended to do if he was ever given power. Did the people who voted for him and who cheered him on not read it? Historians have long assumed they did not.104 Many of them cite the anecdote which Otto Strasser told in his 1940 book Hitler and I. When at the party conference in Nuremberg in 1927 Strasser had admitted to a circle of party functionaries that he had not read all of Mein Kampf, but merely memorised some of the more striking sentences, he claimed that others, including his brother Gregor and Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged not having read it either.105 If that was the case among Hitler’s most immediate subordinates, must it not also be true for his millions of followers—not to mention the many people who were not involved in the NSDAP?