'Mein Kampf' Suppressed—in 1965
By D. C. WATT
Mein Kamp/ has always been regarded as the key to Hitler's mind. Historians and politicians have repeatedly said that, if the main figures of Western Europe had read it and digested its lessons properly when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, there could have been no policy of appeasement.: The Russians certainly read it; its arguments formed a constant theme in Soviet propaganda from 1933 onwards. M. Herriot, the Frenth radical leader, read it, and made it the basis for his resistance to every French argument for attempting to meet Hitler halfway. Churchill read it; Sir Robert Van- sittart read it. Hitler allowed only a bowdlerised version to appear in English; and an authorised French version never appeared at all. Mein Kamp/ has always been regarded as the key to Hitler's mind. Historians and politicians have repeatedly said that, if the main figures of Western Europe had read it and digested its lessons properly when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, there could have been no policy of appeasement.: The Russians certainly read it; its arguments formed a constant theme in Soviet propaganda from 1933 onwards. M. Herriot, the Frenth radical leader, read it, and made it the basis for his resistance to every French argument for attempting to meet Hitler halfway. Churchill read it; Sir Robert Van- sittart read it. Hitler allowed only a bowdlerised version to appear in English; and an authorised French version never appeared at all.
We have little enough as a guide to Hitler's approach to politics. Besides Mein Kampf there is only the so-called Second Book, written in 1927-28, but not published until its resurrection a few years back by an American scholar; a handful of letters from the early years; his secret speeches to selected party and military leaders before and during the war; the conversations reported by Rauschning, the Danzig leader who abandoned Danzig in time to write his best- selling Conversations with Hitler before the war; and Hitler's off-duty Table Talk. The speeches are, of course, multitudinous—but as a guide to his real political mind, Mein Kampf is essential.
It is also virtually unreadable. Its style is long- winded and prolix. It is part autobiography and part the early history of the Nazi party up to 1923; and in both these roles it is totally unreliable. Its philosophical sections are repetitious, filled with long digressions and polemics. Its political sec- tions are fascinating; so are those on the use of uniforms, symbols, flags and public oratory as political weapons. It is also, to me at least, so repulsive, emotionally, even physically so nauseat- ing, that for the twenty-odd years have been engaged in studying Nazism and Nazi Germany, beginning as a member of the British occupa- tion forces in Austria, I have rarely been able to endure to read it for more than half an hour at a time. It is not only the obscenities with which the author loads his discussions of the 'Jewish question.' The whole flavour of the man's mind makes reading Mein Kampf like bathing in sewage.
Yet the more one returns to the study of Nazi Germany and of Hitler himself, in the light of European history of this century, the more essential it seems to comprehend his ideas and what he stood for; to come out of the numbed shell of shock and hatred aroused in one by the experience of war and by the horrors of Belsen, Auschwitz and the Final Solution. As Europe grows together it is essential not only to under- stand what made a great and cultured nation so to reverse its normal self as not only to tolerate but in only too large a degree to follow blindly the system of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, the unspeakable Streicher and the men who
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planned and executed the forced-labour camps, the exterminations in the east, the gas chambers and the Gestapo; but also to understand Hitler himself. For he was a European, not 'merely a German, phenomenon. He was born in the Hapsburg Empire and passed his formative years in the Austria which produced or housed Rilke. Musil and Hofmannsthal, Freud and Wittgenstein. Mahler and Bruckner, Berg, Kokoschka, Srbik and the Austro-Marxists, one of the greatest in- tellectual flowerings in the history of Europe. His intellectual models came as much from France as from Germany. And he is as much a part of Europe's intellectual past as Ranke, Taine, Darwin or Marx.
This is why, when in 1963 I was approached by Hutchinson's, who hold the copyright of the English edition of Mein Kampf, I agreed to undertake the abridgment of the complete text and provide it with a lengthy historical intro- duction. I was aware that there were many who felt that its republication was inadvisable, par- ticularly those who had lost friends and familic in the forced-labour camps and the gas cham- bers. I knew they feared that it would be taken up by neo-Nazis and used again as anti-Semitic propaganda. I believed them wrong. I believed that Hitler's kind of arguments would revive and flourish the more rapidly if those who used them could assume ignorance of their previous user among their audience. The arguments of Mein Kampf survive the easier if they escape identi- fication. Moreover, like many university teachers today, I was finding myself increasingly dissatis- fied with students who could not or would not read the words of the men they were studying and remained content to take everything at, second or third hand, filtered through other minds and neatly packaged.
The manuscript of' the abridgment was de- livered to Hutchinson's in October 1963. In November that year I was approached by a representative of the Germany Embassy, who attempted to persuade me, over an excellent luncheon, to alter one sentence in my introduc- tion. I was able to persuade him that it did not bear the interpretation he had put on it, and he left me apparently satisfied. From that date onwards, things proceeded very slowly. InquirY from the publishers led me to assume that there were still certain difficulties over the copyright' Late in 1964, however, I heard that the pub' lishers were contemplating issuing the whole .text of Mein Kampf as a paperback. I was, in tact' asked to edit this and contribute a rather shorter introduction, after it had been represented to the, publishers that unless the text was re-edited anci provided with a proper introduction such a Pub: lication could well be represented as an attern1?' to cash in on the more morbid aspects of puhltc, interest in Nazism. In March 1965, I receive° several uncorrected bound proof copies of .the abridged edition and was told that the publ!e! tion date was to be late in May 1965. A intle
so later I heard that this had been postponed as not to clash with the Queen's visit to Ger- many, and that a new publication date had been fixed for September; and the publication of both the abridged and the paperback editions was duly announced in Hutchinson's trade catalogue.
On July 31, out of the blue, I suddenly re- ceived a letter from Hutchinson's saying that it had been decided to withdraw the two editions from publication and that at present they-had no plans at all for the publication of either edition in the future. The next day I read the news of this decision in the Sunday Telegraph and dis- covered that the German government, together With the government of Bavaria, which was made residual legatee of Hitler's publications by Allied Order in 1947, were opposed to any publication, and that the Bavarian government had threatened prosecution for infringement of copyright. I discovered also that in February 1965 the Jewish Board of Deputies had protested to Hutchinson's against the publication of Mein Kampf as a Paperback. A columnist in the Jewish Chronicle at the time had seen no objection to the publi- cation. Recent controversy in the Chronicle shows Jewish opinion to be fairly evenly divided on the rights or wrongs of the issue.
Three years ago there were editions circulating in Japanese, Spanish (both Mexican and Spanish editions), French and Portuguese, all dating from 1961-62. In 1963, the Swedish extremist paper Nordisk Kamp advertised a jubilee edition in Swedish, purchasable from a box number. I was aware that the Bavarian government was being criticised for allowing such philo-Nazi publica- tion for the use by, Arab agencies of Arabic editions as anti-Israeli propaganda. But the American firm of Houghton Mifflin, in Boston. and the Canadian firm of T. Allen and Co., Toronto, were still issuing jointly the paperback edition (Sentinel Books), first published in 1962, on which I had made my abridgment. And there seemed to me, and still continues to seem to me, to be all the difference in the world between Publication -of the Nordisk Kamp kind and a scholarly edition aimed at an academic or quasi- academic audience, designed to serve the pur- Pose of explaining and educating those to whom Hitler is history (most of my second-year students St London this year were not yet born when Hitler killed himself). In the two years since I originally undertook to make the abridgment I did my best, both in Britain and in America, to discover whether academic historians would wel- come such a publication—and the reaction I got was overwhelmingly in its favour. Whether the 'It Publication would have been a financial success or not was fortunately of no interest to me. But the welcome given to the project by my fellow- scholars in the same field was confirmation of my own judgment that republication was in the best interests of historical scholarship and the univer- tY teaching of recent history. I tried to get Pie Times to ventilate some of my arguments; put although at first they agreed to entertain a letter on the subject from me, they subsequently thought better of it.
1 am still 'in the dark as to the publishers' reasons for withdrawing these two editions from Publication. But the action of the Bavarian government in threatening to sue for infringe- `lent of copyright cannot but seem a 'belated esItort to deny future historians and political ..e.lentists, as well as the whole lay public, access what is, unfortunate though it may be, one .the central texts of the twentieth century. is the kind of act of censorship which defeats 'firs ?wn aims by attaching the stigma of forbidden i„.t1,1t to what would otherwise be of only clinical luerPst. Moreover, it represents a curiously
abrupt and unexplained reversal of policy on the part of the Bavarian authorities; since it is difficult to imagine that the publishers would have embarked upon a paperback edition while the copyright position of the abridged version was still in question.
Why is the publication of Mein Kampf not convenable in the eyes of the German authorities in 1965 when there was no objection in 1962 or 1963? And why are reputable publishers, pro- ducing what is intended to be a scholarly edition by an academic historian, regarded in the same light as a fly-by-night peddler of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No publisher can be prevented from publishing pretty picture-books of Belsen and Auschwitz, or novels about the Gestapo or the Warsaw ghetto, designed to appeal to the voyeur-sadistic impulses of the public by emphasising every revolting detail of what Nazi rule meant to those whose humanity it denied; nor should they. 'Television plays can freely put speeches in the mouths of their charac- ters reviling the whole German people as Nazis and murderers. Yet those who wish to set events in their historical perspective and to compre- hend the whole European past as a preparation to reconciliation with the Europe of the present are to be denied the tools to do their work. And a book which has been in the public domain since 1925, of which literally millions of copies have been sold in all the major languages, is suddenly to be suppressed by the copyright holders on the Orwellian grounds of political convenience.
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