Did Germany Read Mein Kampf?

On 11 April 1942, during one of Hitler’s habitual monologues before his inner circle at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ headquarters in East Prussia, talk turned to Alfred Rosenberg’s book The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The Nazi theorist’s notoriously impenetrable volume, first published in 1930, had become one of the core ideological texts of the Third Reich, in which Rosenberg proffered, in almost unreadably dense prose, a racial history of the world and argued for the Aryan race’s inherent, yet embattled, superiority. Hitler had personally awarded the author the newly instituted German National Order for Art and Science in January 1938. Yet four years on, Hitler’s private comments were dismissive. The publishers, he noted, had had ‘great difficulty in disposing of the first edition’. Furthermore, the book’s core readership was to be found mostly outside the Nazi movement. Interest in the book had been largely driven by Catholic opposition to it.