Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
- A century after its publication, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler remains a controversial book due to its hate speech and connection to the Holocaust.
- Initially, the manifesto was a major flop. It needed extensive edits, and even those weren’t enough to improve its readability.
- As Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power, however, Mein Kampf became a bestseller that was translated into 11 languages.
In late 1923 and early 1924, Adolf Hitler, a poverty-stricken, failed painter and semi-successful soldier, sat in a German jail. He had been found guilty of high treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch, a plot to overthrown the Weimar Republic, Germany’s democratically elected government.
Like so many political figures—Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Václav Havel, to name just a few—Hitler wrote a book in prison. Unlike these peaceful and equality-minded men, though, he didn’t rely on pride or call for tolerance and acceptance. Instead, in Mein Kampf or “My Struggle,” Hitler complained about being a victim: of his father, of art school, and of the government. Furthermore, he blamed most of his own—and Germany’s—problems on Jewish people, calling for their expulsion from the country. He also explained his concept of Lebensraum, the takeover of neighboring territory so that people of Aryan descent, a politically created racial group, would be able to live in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other bordering countries.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote about “making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race,” as William L. Shirer succinctly summarized in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. This state would include all Germans, even people who lived in other countries (thus making it necessary to invade neighboring countries), and would have an absolute dictatorship in its leader. According to Hitler, his plan would make Germany a greater state than it was before World War I, because the new country would be created around racial laws, not as a monarchy as it been before or as a democratic government as it was currently.
Mein Kampf was published on July 18, 1925, when Hitler was 36. A century later, it remains one of the most notorious books in history. But initially, Hitler’s work was an abject failure, partly because, as reviewed in The New York Times, it was “unreadable.” In fact, the book only became a success after Hitler and his Nazi party came into power and began to sell and distribute the work.
From the beginning, Hitler’s shocking book has had a complicated history. Mein Kampf was banned from being published for decades after World War II. But in recent years, it has prompted a renewed debate about censorship: Is it still dangerous or a helpful warning?
Hitler’s first draft of Mein Kampf required an overhaul
Although the Beer Hall Putsch was a failure, it did bring Hitler, as its leader, some notoriety. He was sentenced to five years in jail but only served nine months. While in Landsberg prison, he began to write a book called 4 ½ Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit: Eine Abrechnung, or “4½ Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice: A Reckoning.”
Hitler’s writing, according to his colleagues, reviewers, and translators at the time and in later scholarly research, was unreadable due to its lack of logic and organization as well as its poor grammar. To publish Mein Kampf with some semblance of cohesion, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, and Nazi party publishers heavily edited the writing and changed the title.
Hitler had once been the chief of propaganda for the Nazi party, and that experience informed his writing. Much of Mein Kampf focuses on how important propaganda is to a political party that wants to gain more power. Somewhat ironically considering his own scattered prose, he wrote that propaganda must be “simple and repetitious,” according to a 2023 scholarly article. This approach worked for the Nazis, officially known as the National Socialist German Workers Party, as they steadily rose to power in the 1930s.
Of course, much of what Hitler wrote was open to interpretation. For example, some readers think a passage such as this calls for genocide against Jews, while others think he is using the idea as a rhetorical device: “If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front (of World War I) would not have been in vain.”
While Mein Kampf is poorly written, its main points—antisemitism, territorial expansion through war, and the use of propaganda through oratory and visual statements—were key to what became the brief and brutal success of the Nazis. Because his violent overthrow of the German government had failed, Hitler realized that change could only occur from within, and he worked to popularize ideas that would eventually get so many members of the Nazi party elected. By 1927, Hitler had released a second volume of Mein Kampf. He also wrote a sequel, though that wasn’t discovered until after the war.
Once elected, the Nazis made Mein Kampf into a bestseller
Of the 10,000 copies of Mein Kampf that were published in 1925, nearly all were sold before sales began to flatline. That changed five years later when 107 Nazis were elected to the German parliament after previously holding 12 seats. Then, in 1932, they achieved a greater percentage of seats, and book sales rose. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, almost 230,000 copies had been sold by the end of that year.
Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, and, once in control of the country, the Nazi party expected schools, churches, and government offices to purchase copies of Mein Kampf. This widespread publication made Hitler a millionaire, and the Nazi publishing house created special editions to celebrate holidays and special occasions in the lives of everyday Germans, such as birthday and weddings.
Mein Kampf was successful not just in his own country, but also around the world. Benito Mussolini, another fascist dictator, for example, made sure it was translated into Italian and published there. By the start of World War II in 1939, the book was translated into 11 languages and some 5.2 million copies had been sold. Leaders of Nazi parties around the world, including in the United States, said that Mein Kampf had validated their thinking about Jewish people, democracy, and the use of violence to achieve political goals.
Fascist sentiment rising high, the global conflict led to even more printings. By 1945, there were more than 12 million copies of Mein Kampf in circulation.
Mein Kampf was banned for decades. Then, a critical edition came out
Once the Allied Forces defeated the Axis countries of Germany, Japan, and Italy in 1945, the United States, through the Marshall Plan, led the post-war rebuilding of Germany. At this time, Bavaria, a state within Germany, was given the copyright to Mein Kampf. Under that copyright, which expired in December 2015, the book couldn’t be republished. This aligned with incitement-to-violence laws that banned the swastika and other Nazi symbols.
Of course, there were still millions of copies of Mein Kampf in circulation and in many languages, too. People were able to find and buy copies of the book all over the world even as the publication of Hitler’s manifesto was illegal.
Early in the 21st century, publishers, historians, and politicians began to discuss what should be done when the 70-year time limit on publishing Mein Kampf ran out. Should it be republished? Should a ban on its publication be renewed? By that time, too, excerpts and full-text copies of the text were available on the internet, further defeating the publication ban.
Given the book’s ready availability, in early 2016, Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History published a critical edition of Mein Kampf. Almost 2,000 pages, the two-volume work has over 3,500 annotations. The Institute shared that its critical edition “seeks to thoroughly deconstruct Hitler’s propaganda in a lasting manner and thus to undermine the still effective symbolic power of the book.”
It was an immediate bestseller in Germany, and there were many print runs as well as translations. Most importantly, the many historians and fact-checkers who worked on the book were able to address and debunk the racist ideas, none of which were based on biological science, that Hitler espoused in the book. Despite the manifesto’s continuing ability to inspire neo-Nazis, most historians and academics think having its hatefulness and delusion out in the open serves the greater good more than censoring it.
Even in 2025, Mein Kampf remains controversial. In April, after a review by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and people in his department, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was removed from the shelves of the United States Naval Academy Nimitz Library, but two copies of Mein Kampf were still on the shelves, according to The New York Times.
Since 2010, Donna Raskin, a longtime writer and editor, has taught history classes at the College of New Jersey. As a child, she read and re-read every book in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. As an adult, she collects fashion history books and has traveled to Paris on a fashion history tour. In addition to contributing to Biography.com, she is the senior health and fitness editor at Bicycling and Runner’s World.
