An Opinionated Book Review of Adolf Hitler’s “MEIN KAMPF” by Jethro Ndhlovu (Part I) ? 2023

I have just slogged reading through the autobiography by Adolf Hitler “Mein Kampf".

The aim of this surmise of the book, is not to critic the whole work, but rather to focus on his expose on the Jewish race and his attitude toward and perception of them. I will of course reference one or two aspects of his book, that I deem relevant, but on the whole, I do not intend this to be a scholastic review (treatise), a psychological or psychiatric exposé, as those are not my areas of competence, but rather a personal point of view. ?

I found Adolf Hitler, from reading his autobiography (memoir), to be a contradiction and a caricature. But about that later. ?

The review of this work of authorship will centre on aspects that I believe shaped Adolf Hitler’s life, specifically Chapters I, II & XI titled, respectively, “In the Home of my Parents”, “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna” and “Race and People” because, in my opinion, I feel these encapsulate who and what Hitler was and became.

But to begin, it’s important to trace where his doggedly held beliefs emanate from. What made him come to believe in his fanatical ideology of hate and dismissiveness, specifically of “other” races such as Jews, indeed all the Jewish ethnicity and any non-Aryan race. The beginning of who Hitler was to become, can be found in Chapter I.

He writes, ‘[w]hen my mother died my fate had already been decided…”. He tried to get into the Academy of Arts in Vienna in the School of Painting but was rejected with the Rector of the Academy advising him that he stood a better chance with the School of architecture, looking at the drawings he had submitted to the School of Painting.

As it happened, he was rejected entry into the School of Architecture because as a pre-requisite to qualify for that School, as writes, he first needed to enter the Technical Building School which required one to have a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School.

After the death of his mother, he believed his “…lot in life seemed a harsh one” while later in life he came to believe that the “wise workings of Providence” were evident as the “Goddess of Fate clutched me in her hands and threatened to smash me; but the will grew stronger as the obstacles increased, and finally the will triumphed”. ??????

Hitler believed that this experience toughened him to be the man he would eventually become and appreciated the fact that it saved him from “…the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother’s darling was taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as a new mother”.

This period is what he claims threw him in the world of poverty and misery and introduced him to the people (the German working class specifically and the German people particularly) for whom he would thereafter fight. He recalls also that “circumstances forced me to return to that world of poverty and economic insecurity above which my father had raised himself in his early days; and thus the blinkers of a narrow petit bourgeois education were torn from my eyes”. ?

From the start, Hitler believed himself the “chosen man” for, firstly, the reparation of all the humiliation the German people and their motherland had suffered after the defeat in WW1 and the consequent invasion by France and the occupation of the Ruhr District as well as other surrounding towns in the Rhineland, an action protested even by certain British political sections as a flagrant breach of international law and to, secondly, consequently resolve the “social problem” which he described as “[t]he horde of workers who loitered in abject poverty which confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchants face to face”.

Further, Hitler believed that the only way to study and therefore resolve the “social problem” was from the bottom up and not the reverse as that was an illusion. This illusion could only be dispelled by the person who knew the suffering of the common man, which he Hitler prided himself on being and not the aristocratic and merchant classes who he described as “the man who had never been in the clutches of that vicious viper can never know what its poison is”.

He concluded that “to study it in any other way would result only in superficial talk and sentimental delusions. Both are harmful”. The first, would not get to the root of the question and the second, would evade the question entirely.

It was around this period, he writes, that he became aware of two existential perils to the existence of the German people. These two perils: Marxism and Judaism.

Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, a town in Upper Austria on the border with Germany on 20th April 1889 and died on 30th April 1945. He was fanatically proud of what he understood to be his German heritage and believed that his birth town which was “Bavarian by blood” and German-Austria must, at all cost, be reunited to the “great German Motherland”. Immediately, we see the character of the later Hitler developing and peeping from behind his attitude and beliefs. His nationalism. ??

Re-unification of German-Austria to the German Empire had been Otto Von Bismarck’s (first Chancellor of the German Empire) dream, but it remained as such until Adolf Hitler turned it into reality in 1938.

His writing seems to indicate a ferocious pride in his father, who he says, with tenacity rose from being a son of a poor cottager to the position of a respected civil servant and he had a deep devoted love for his mother and considered himself his “mother’s darling”. ??