Original subtitles

(projector rattling)

- [Lisa] Whilst many may easily dismiss his words

as the ramblings of a madman,

the reality is that Hitler came to power

and brought devastation, destruction,

and the largest genocide in the course of modern history.

(people shouting in foreign language)

- [Lisa] The centenary of the publication of "Mein Kampf"

is an opportune moment to remind ourselves

that vigilance is necessary

to prevent the rise of extreme political movements

and autocratic leaders representing dangerous

and indeed murderous ideologies.

(people shouting in foreign language)

- [Guy] Nazism ultimately is a political religion,

and all religions have their books, their holy books,

and "Mein Kampf" is Nazism's holy book.

- This was all very careful manipulation of the masses,

and he was very good at that.

- The language in "Mein Kampf" is violent, it's incoherent,

it's nasty, it's divisive, and it's unpleasant.

It is a work of utter monomaniacal narcissism.

(dramatic music continues)

(music fades out)

(projector whirring)

People who revere Hitler,

people who read "Mein Kampf" and think it's a great book

are deluded, evil, nasty, bigoted,

and their thinking should have no place in any society.

(people shouting in foreign language)

- Extreme nationalist ideas of the type expressed in "Mein Kampf"

are not uncommon today.

- I'm here for in memoriam, I'm here for the future,

I'm here for the (indistinct) as well.

For 1,000 years and for 1,000 years to come.

- All for white power!

(ominous music)

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

- "Mein Kampf" sets out an abhorrent and pernicious ideology.

The words are distasteful, violent, strong, and graphic.

But illustrative of a man who needed to be taken seriously.

(Nazis shouting in foreign language)

- There was no doubt that the German population

knew exactly what was going on,

but the German population was cowed, it was living in fear,

and it felt that there was nothing it could do.

- And that was the danger, that he wasn't taken seriously.

They underestimated him, they failed to take him seriously,

or they simply believed

that those ideas could never be translated into action,

that they were just rhetoric.

And I think of course that was a fundamental error

in the way that "Mein Kampf" was viewed

and the way in which Hitler was viewed too.

(people shouting in foreign language)

(ominous music)

(ominous music fades out)

- The mood in Germany at the end of World War I

was that of a humiliated and defeated people and nation.

This fight had been going on for four years.

Millions of people had died and no one had got anything

or no one had got anywhere.

Those responsible for it

were people like Hitler's claims of Jews and Marxists

and basically anybody who had signed the armistice

that ended the fighting.

(ominous music)

In the early 1920s, Germany was in a mess.

There's no other word for it.

There was economic upheaval, there was political turmoil,

there were revolutions taking place all over bits of Germany,

and we are approaching a time of absolute chaos.

This is very, very fertile ground for extremist politics.

- The political situation in Germany in the early 1920s

was very much a reflection of social and economic problems

generated by the First World War and its aftermath.

The new Weimar democracy had to deal with quite a lot of threats

from both the extreme political left

and the extreme political right.

One of the myths that circulated

at the end of the First World War, particularly put about

by these extreme radical right-wing groups,

was the stab in the back myth.

So this was the idea that actually,

if they'd been left to conclude,

the German army would've been successful on the battlefield.

So this kind of whole myth grew up in the postwar period

and then of course there was a lot of resentment

that came about as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.

Perhaps the most important was the War Guilt Clause,

so this was Article 231,

which placed the blame or the responsibility for the war

upon Germany and Germany's allies.

In addition, the Treaty of Versailles took away

quite a lot of Germany's territory

as well as her overseas empire too,

so there was kind of quite a lot

of nationalist resentment against that.

And I think one of the parts

that really rankled the most with Hitler

was the clause in it that said that Austria,

so that was Hitler's homeland,

and Germany should not be able to be unified.

Hitler hated that and very much saw his mission

to actually tear up the Treaty of Versailles

to achieve the union, the Anschluss, between Austria and Germany.

(ominous music continues)

- You have to remember that Adolf Hitler

and the National Socialist German Workers' Party,

the Nazi Party, were just one of many right-wing groups

that were springing up all over Germany.

(ominous music) (projector rattling)

We think of it today as this kind of colossal figure.

Back then, he was just the leader

of what was just a fairly fringe minor party.

People would've seen them as being somewhat cranky, extreme,

obsessed with Jews, obsessed with Marxism.

In the early 20s, Hitler and the Nazis were just another bunch

of the lunatic fringe.

- It was completely unremarkable

until a combination of events and circumstances

pushed it into a position of political prominence.

The party started out its life called the DAP,

the German Workers' Party, and changed its name to the NSDAP,

the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

From that time and Hitler's early association with the movement,

and again, particularly his speeches,

which started to get him quite a lot of interest

and fame in the party in those early years.

So these were the things that started to make the difference.

Hitler also maneuvered himself quite early on

to become the party leader.

He ousted the original two party leaders

and became leader very quickly

and also then very quickly introduced

the party's program and also the party's newspaper,

the Volkischer Beobachter,

and also the party's paramilitary wing as well.

The Storm Troopers, the SA.

And these things were important

because all the existing parties had their own press,

had their own paramilitary wing,

and so really what the Nazi Party was doing

was kind of announcing its arrival.

(ominous music continues)

- In 1923, Hitler asked for the help

of a general for the First World War,

a man called Erich Ludendorff.

And he says to Ludendorff, "I want to have a coup

and I wanna take control violently."

And this becomes known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

- A putsch is an attempt to overthrow

an existing governmental system.

So tending to be something

that's kind of quite a highly guarded secret,

kept hidden until the last moment

and so that it can have more impact.

But essentially the main aim is to destabilize

and indeed to overthrow an existing government.

And that's what Hitler attempted in November 1923.

(ominous music)

- The Munich Beer Hall Putsch became one of the key components

in the Nazis' mythology or legend, if you like.

Actually, even though it was venerated by the Nazis,

it was a disaster.

It was a complete cockup, there's no other word for it.

- [Lisa] On the 8th of November, 1923,

together with a band of his closest comrades and bodyguards,

he stormed into the Burgerbraukeller in Munich

where the State Commissioner for Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr,

was holding a meeting.

- You have Hitler and various senior Nazis

going to this beer hall

where all these politicians were assembled.

Hitler strides in, fires a revolver in the air,

climbs onto the stage,

and basically kind of arrests, if you like,

these three major political figures

and says, "If you don't work with me, I'm gonna shoot you,

and I'm now in charge."

You know, it's all very well

to get on the stage in a beer hall and say,

"I'm the king of the world,"

but actually you've gotta go out and radiate your power.

And so by the kind of early hours of the morning,

after lots of dithering and humming and harring,

Hitler says, "Well, we've gotta march somewhere,

so why don't we march into Munich?"

And they say to the three guys they've arrested,

"Do you promise not to run away?"

And they go, "Yeah, we promise not to run away."

And as soon as the Nazis walk out the building,

those three politicians run away and they tell, you know,

the local police, the local armed forces

to resist this, you know, Nazi putsch.

And that's exactly what happens.

Hitler, Goring, various other senior Nazis,

they're walking through Munich

and then suddenly there's this gun battle.

It only lasts 30 seconds.

But during it, Hermann Garing, a very senior Nazi,

is shot in the leg.

Quite a few Nazis are actually shot dead.

Some local police are shot dead.

It's just chaos.

- Hitler was also injured, he dislocated his shoulder,

yet he was sort of bundled into the back of a getaway car

and taken to the country house,

the estate of his friend, Ernst Hanfstaengl.

So he kind of hid out there for a couple of days,

but then the police caught up with him,

and on the 11th of November he was arrested

and brought to trial for treason.

(ominous music)

(projector clicking)

Hitler used the trial really

to gain as much publicity as he could

for his movement and for his party.

- For most people, going on trial for mounting an insurrection

would represent a bit of a problem.

For Hitler, it represents a massive opportunity.

This is a showcase for Hitler and, you know,

it's a place for him to get on the stage, he loves the stage,

and tell the world as well as the court, you know, his views.

And so this is it, it becomes a platform for him

that actually, rather than shutting Hitler up,

it actually gives him more voice.

- So Hitler was placed in what was known as fortress confinement

at Landsberg Prison.

And in fact, despite the five-year sentence,

he served less than a year.

And during that time, it was, again,

a kind of relatively lenient kind of imprisonment.

He was in a relatively light and airy cell, quite comfortable.

He could spend a number of hours each day outside his cell,

he could decorate his cell.

It's kind of quite a privileged imprisonment, one could say.

The seeds of the history of the Nazi Party

were planted very much in those days that Hitler spent

at Landsberg Castle.

And an important part of the reason for that

is that it was here that "Mein Kampf" was born.

- "Mein Kampf" is a book or two books

written by Adolf Hitler in 1925

when he was in Landsberg Prison

and also partly written when he had left and published in 1926.

Those two volumes together are known as "Mein Kampf,"

and that means "My struggle."

In it, Hitler performs two functions.

First of all, it's autobiographical.

It's his struggle through life to get to where he is today.

And it's also his political manifesto and his views of the world

and how he sees the world and how he sees the world should be.

And in it he makes no doubt

about various positions that he wants to take

when he is ruler of the world.

It is a work of utter monomaniacal narcissism.

It's also almost completely unreadable

and almost nobody in the world

has read all of "Mein Kampf" from cover to cover.

- It's been widely believed that he dictated this book

to his fellow prisoners, Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice,

during those months of imprisonment in 1924.

However, more recently there's been some sense

that maybe he actually typed up the words himself

on a typewriter that he had in his cell.

Either way, what came out was "Mein Kampf",

published in 1925 by the publisher Franz Eher Verlag

which became the Nazis Press and which was run by Max Amann.

And he was the one who'd sort of suggested to Hitler

to write this book to give him something to do.

Hitler thought that with his career very much at an all-time low

being placed in prison at this point, that by writing this book

maybe he could earn some money, for a start,

and secondly, that maybe he'd be able to get his ideas

more widely known as well.

- Hitler loved to ramble.

He loved to go on and on and on, and some of his fellow prisoners

would just get really, really annoyed by the fact

that he would always be lecturing them

and telling them this and that.

And so actually some people suggest that actually he was,

you know, suggested he could do "Mein Kampf"

just as a way to give some sort of focus to all these ramblings.

- The other really important reason

that Hitler had for writing this book

was to imprint his leadership on the party.

So it was written very much for his followers to follow him,

and then that kind of group of followers

then became an expanded group

as he became more and more popular through the early 1930s

and then of course once he came to power in January 1933.

(ominous music) (projector rattling)

- Hitler outlines a lot of kind of policies, if you like,

if we can dignify them as such, in "Mein Kampf."

But the three big ones are these.

First of all, it's a desire to eradicate Bolshevism,

Communism, Marxism, whatever you wanna call it.

You know, he doesn't like the left.

- [Announcer] Even as they rejoiced,

the chains of slavery were slipping around their necks.

Lenin's communism was not designed

with the individual's freedom in mind.

- He also wants to get rid of the Jews.

He sees Jews as being an evil virus, if you like.

I mean, he always talks about 'em as a kind of,

as a sort of like a bacteria.

And also he wants to create what he calls Lebensraum,

living space for the Germanic people.

He thinks that Germany should be a major world power

and have lots more space for Germans to live in,

and he looks around the European continent

and sees where German-type people are living

and thinks that more and more Germans

should inhabit those spaces.

And so what you're looking at here

is a work published in the mid-20s

that told the world exactly what Hitler wanted.

He wanted to get rid of Jews, he wanted to get rid of communists,

and he wanted Germany to invade other countries.

(gentle music) (projector rattling)

- The very first sentence reads,

"Today, it seems to me providential

that fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn

as my birthplace."

As this small town was situated on the border

between Germany and the Austrian Empire,

this sort of led Hitler to believe

that he had some kind of messianic purpose in life,

that he had this God-given mission,

a nationalistic mission.

So from this very early date, Hitler's already talking about

the union between his homeland, Austria, and Germany.

So it's essentially Pan-Germanism

and it was nothing short of bringing all Germans,

all German speakers into the same territory,

the same geographical unit.

He also more generally very much dislikes,

even hates the Habsburg Empire, so the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

and what it represents.

He believed that the Germans' rights

were sort of being suppressed,

whereas he regarded that the empire was being slavicized,

so that the rights of the Slavic peoples were being raised

at the expense of the Germans'.

He didn't like at all the multi-nationalism

or the multi-ethnicity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And essentially he just didn't like the way that it worked,

and most importantly he didn't like the way

that it was separate from Germany.

(projector rattling)

- In "Mein Kampf,"

Hitler outlines his autobiography, essentially,

and the key years are those he spends as a young man in Vienna

where he is a young man who had wanted to go to art school,

if you like, and failed to get in.

He was bitter, he was destitute, he was, you know,

living, you know, on a kind of hand-to-mouth,

very much day-to-day basis.

And in "Mein Kampf" he talks about his awakening

of what he will begin to be calling the Jewish problem.

(ominous music)

And he says, you know,

"Initially I had no beef, if you like, with Jews.

We had a Jewish boy in our class

and we were just a bit wary of him."

So, you know, mild antisemitism.

But that antisemitism really gets picked up in Vienna

because he starts reading anti-Semitic journals,

anti-Semitic, you know, newspapers,

and he starts getting basically infected by it.

And like so many other people,

he looks at Jewish people and thinks,

"Actually, these people don't really belong here.

Sometimes they dress differently.

They worship in a different way.

They seem to be very commercially successful,

and I'm not, so therefore it's their fault."

And it's in Vienna where he really picks up

this really virulent antisemitism.

That's a really, really key part of "Mein Kampf."

- Hitler's antisemitism is expressed

probably as the biggest theme in "Mein Kampf,"

so it's the one that comes up the most.

So if you looked in the index for the word Jew or Jews,

that's the one that literally comes up the most,

so it's the biggest topic, it's the biggest theme,

and we know that his personal antisemitism became central

to state policy once he came to power.

(Hitler speaking in foreign language)

(crowd cheers)

(people shouting in foreign language)

- He talks about them as the destroyer of culture.

So not only he says do they not have anything to contribute,

but they actively destroy existing cultures,

and obviously he's mainly talking about Germanic culture.

Same thing in terms of blood,

he talks about racial miscegenation or racial mixing.

If they've been mixing with what he regarded to be pure Germans

and this racial mixing took place,

then this would have an impact on the next generation,

which in his view would be regarded as inferior and tainted.

- It's possible to look at "Mein Kampf" and go,

"Ah, the Holocaust starts here."

Hitler talks about, you know, eradication.

He talks about, you know, ending the Jewish problem.

What Hitler doesn't say in "Mein Kampf" is,

"I'm going to have a network of death camps

in which I'm going to gas Jewish men, women, and children."

It's never explicit.

It's very hard to look at "Mein Kampf" and go,

"Yes, that is a blueprint for genocide,"

'cause the wording's ambiguous.

- According to Hitler in "Mein Kampf,"

"It was the sacred mission of the German people to assemble

and preserve the most valuable racial elements

and raise them to the dominant position."

He also wrote, "All who are not of a good race are chaff,"

and this gives us the idea that they're expendable.

And Hitler ascribed international significance

to the elimination of Jews, which he wrote in "Mein Kampf,"

"must necessarily be a bloody process."

And so, whilst we've said that the whole plan for the Holocaust

was not there at this stage, we kind of see the seeds there

and we see the ideology there from 1924.

And this needed to be taken seriously, and I think it wasn't.

(projector rattling)

(lively music)

- [Announcer] Moscow's Red Square is ablaze with banners

for the arrival of Joseph Stalin who leads Russia's millions

in the 15th anniversary celebration

of the birth of the Soviet Union.

High Russian officials enter the square

as the Moscow Garrison's Honor Guards stands still at attention.

Stalin, Red Russia's man of the hour,

mans the Lenin's Mausoleum to watch the celebration.

- One of the important key themes in "Mein Kampf"

is Hitler's hatred of communism or Bolshevism or even socialism,

anything of those ideas of the political left

he absolutely hated.

(lively music)

In "Mein Kampf,"

he described Marxism as a doctrine of destruction.

And this was something that permeated his ideas and his policies

right through into the waging of the Second World War

against the USSR, regarded as the archenemy ideologically.

- [Announcer] For six long years,

every Russian worker has been told

that Hitler's Germany was the Soviet Union's deadliest

and most dangerous enemy.

(projector rattling)

- Hitler had no original ideas of his own.

What Hitler was very good at doing was absorbing other ideas

and presenting them as, you know, his own personally,

as if he had this sort of kind of messianic ability

to sort of lead the world with his original thinking.

(Hitler shouting in foreign language)

(crowd cheers)

(crowd cheering)

- What he was very, very influenced by

was a lot of, you know, anthropological and racial science

that was washing around since the end of the 19th century

in which it was fundamentally believed

there were huge differences between the races

and some races were better than other races,

and the worst thing you could do was to marry and reproduce

with someone from a different race

because that would contaminate your own race.

So this whole idea of racial purity, not Hitler's idea,

but he takes on board.

Hitler also learn some medical thinking at the time

as well as racial hygiene is this idea of eugenics,

is this idea that you've got to kind of breed healthy,

you know, biological human stock.

What Hitler's doing

is taking strands that were in medical thinking at the time

and politicizing them.

- Hitler was already talking in "Mein Kampf"

about the need to sterilize those

who were not regarded to be kind of the greatest value

to the German nation.

And of course, once the Nazis came to power

during the wartime period,

they put into place the policy known as Aktion T4,

or Operation T4,

which was essentially the mass murder

of the asylum population in Germany,

so the mentally and physically ill.

(projector rattling)

- [Announcer] Are exhumed for autopsy.

90,000 are buried here.

15,000 who died in a lethal gas chamber were cremated

and their ashes interred.

Death books found hidden in the wine cellar

of the Hadamar institution

revealed part of the story of the mass killings.

The bulky volumes contained thousands of death certificates.

"Profession unknown, nationality unknown"

was written after each name.

(soft somber music continues)

(projector clicking)

(projector rattling)

- [Lisa] Whilst Hitler's personal antisemitism

is perhaps the most widely known

and indeed the biggest theme of "Mein Kampf,"

Hitler's fundamental aim to destroy democracy

was also central to his thoughts as outlined in "Mein Kampf"

and to his actions in practice.

(Nazis shouting in foreign language)

- Hitler absolutely excoriated the existing political system,

and this is abundantly clear in his writing.

He wrote that decisions were made

"by a majority of ignoramuses and incompetence."

He described parliamentarians

as "mentally dependent non-entities."

And I think that one of the important lessons

we need to take from this

is that actually these were written down,

they were there for people to see from this very early date.

- Germany in the 1920s was a place where democracy

really did not have a firm footing.

The Weimar Republic, as it was known, was quite weak.

People looked at democracy, and Hitler was one of them,

looked at democracy and thought,

"This is failing, this isn't working here."

Whereas countries like Britain had mature democracies,

although women only had the vote very recently,

certainly there were a hell of a lot more Democratic

and the democratic institutions had sort of bedded in,

there was a maturity there.

But Hitler looks at democracy and thinks,

"Actually, this is weak, it's flabby, it's not the way forward."

He looks at communism,

he thinks it will sort of basically eradicate German culture

and the German way of living.

He doesn't think that's a way forward.

So of course, before he's even really heard of the word fascism,

he is going down that path of a kind of authoritarian leadership

and kind of treating a country

like today a business would be run.

Businesses aren't run like democracies.

They're run by, you know, an apex of leaders

and they tell their employees what to do.

That's how Hitler thought countries should be run.

Not a place where, you know, the people at the bottom,

the voters could tell the leaders what to do

and get rid of them.

He thought, "No, once I'm in power, I'm there for 1,000 years."

(crowd cheers)

"Mein Kampf," after it's published in 25-26,

it's not a runaway success.

It doesn't attract huge sales.

And so I think that people, you know,

look at "Mein Kampf" at the time and go,

"Well, it's a bit crazy, it's a bit incoherent."

And Hitler actually in later years

comes to be a bit embarrassed by it

and just regards it as nothing more

than what should have been a series

of kind of articles or columns

for the Volkischer Beobachter, the People's Observer,

one of the Nazi newspapers.

- This quickly changed in 1930

when the Nazi Party made huge gains

in the parliamentary elections,

and then the sales of "Mein Kampf" increased enormously

because people wanted to see what he was all about.

Once in power, of course,

then there was kind of quite a lot of pressure by the party

for a much wider readership.

(crowd cheering)

In 1933, the year that Hitler came to power,

1.5 million copies were sold.

And then the state started to recommend

that all public officials should have a copy of the book.

From 1936, a copy that was put together

and called "The People's Edition,"

which had both volumes bound together into one,

was presented to all newlywed married couples on their marriage.

Also, businesses gave out copies of the book

for good performance,

so kind of as a kind of incentive for hard work.

And deluxe versions were also made available,

and in 1936 too there was a braille edition.

Now, how many people actually read "Mein Kampf"?

We don't know.

What we do know is that it made Hitler personally very wealthy.

This personal wealth allowed Hitler to purchase

and to later very lavishly decorate the Berghof.

(ominous music)

(projector rattling)

Of course, "Mein Kampf" was not the only important

and influential political text.

We can think about several others.

And one very important one, of course,

was "The Communist Manifesto,"

published in 1848, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

So this was the manifesto of the Communist Party

and became a very influential tract upon communists

in all the periods thereafter.

You know, starting with Lenin

in his overthrowing of Tsar Nicholas II

and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat

and setting up the initial Soviet Union,

and then followed on even more pragmatically, one could say,

by Stalin in his years as ruler of the USSR.

I think also important, of course,

was what was known as "The Little Red Book,"

so "The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung" in China.

This was published in October 1966,

which was the year of the Cultural Revolution,

which had wide ranging ramifications on Chinese society.

Now this book was published in different kinds of editions.

It's kind of quite well known as "The Little Red Book,"

it is a little red book.

It had many quotations,

all these kind of keywords and phrases of Chairman Mao.

The most popular edition, in fact, was pocket size,

so the idea was that the party faithful

could and should indeed have a copy of "The Little Red Book"

with them at all times

so they could recite from it, they could learn from it,

they could practice from it.

And that was the purpose and that was the function.

And really it was designed to impact the lives

of each and every Chinese citizen.

We've also got North Korea's monolithic system of thought.

This was called "The 10 Principles for the Establishment

of a Monolithic Ideological System,"

and these were principles that guided the governance

and the behavior of the population of North Korea.

First published in 1974,

it called for absolute loyalty and obedience

to the ideas of Kim Il Sung

and then later his successor too, Kim Jong Il.

(people shouting in foreign language)

The similarities of these other texts to "Mein Kampf"

obviously was that they were very important political treatises

that had far reaching influence

upon the followers of those movements

in the USSR, in China, and in North Korea.

- But I think "Mein Kampf"

of all those kind of political bibles

is unique 'cause it's autobiographical

in a way that some of the others simply aren't.

It's also unique 'cause it's a really, really terrible book.

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

(Nazis repeat in foreign language)

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

(Nazis repeat in foreign language)

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

(Nazis repeat in foreign language)

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

(Nazis repeat in foreign language)

(Nazi speaking in foreign language)

(Nazis shout in foreign language)

- You've gotta remember that extremist politics

and extremist parties

are run more like religions than, you know,

sensible political parties.

Nazism is a political religion and "Mein Kampf" is its Bible.

And because they're like religions

and because they require faith and zeal and fervor,

their leader is often portrayed

in kind of messianic, demigod-like terms.

And so the Nazi propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels

makes Hitler into this demigod figure.

- There really was this idea

that Hitler had already established much earlier on

about having this mission or this God-given duty

really to save Germany from all of its problems,

social problems, economic problems, and political problems.

(ominous music)

- At these rallies, you know,

he's at the center of thousands and thousands of people.

He walks through the crowds from behind to address them

and they turn around and look at him.

You know, everything is about theatrics

to make him look like a demigod.

- The whole image of the Fuhrer as the great leader

obviously started out as leader of the party,

but then came, once Hitler came to power,

to be the Fuhrer of the whole nation as well.

And so in this, his position was obviously very powerful

and his word was the last word.

(ominous music)

A key quote in "Mein Kampf"

in regard to German youth was this.

"He alone who owns the youth gains the future."

And so Hitler was absolutely determined, so even from 1924,

to secure the future of Germany

and to secure the future of his party.

And all of this he believed he could do

through the attraction that the party could exert

upon Germany's youth.

So he saw the youth as absolutely crucial

to the future success of both the party and the nation.

(youth chanting in foreign language)

- Hitler saw children as being absolutely vital

for keeping himself in power,

because he knew that if he could sort of, you know,

mold the thinking of the younger generation,

they were gonna be with him forever.

Hitler sees the Third Reich in thousands-of-year terms,

and where better place to start

than working on the adults of tomorrow.

Mold their mind, teach them in schools the rightness of Nazism,

and they'll be with you forever.

(canons booming)

- [Announcer] German guns, German bombs.

(planes whirring) (siren blaring)

(bombs booming)

(artillery booming)

(tank whirring)

- World War II of course became not just a war of military might,

but one of ideals too.

And that was because the Allied powers were determined

to fight the good war against the aggression and the dogma

of the Axis powers, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Japan.

- It was an ideological battle against two things.

Against Bolshevism and against the Jews.

Those two things he felt threatened humanity

as much as we today feel, you know,

climate change threatens us.

You know, that was what Hitler thought,

that's how he saw communism and the Jews,

he saw them as basically the end of humanity.

(ominous music)

"Mein Kampf" was written by Hitler and it's his book.

And after the collapse and after Hitler's death,

the Allied powers saw "Mein Kampf"

as something that could potentially be used

by Neo-Nazis as a kind of, you know, sort of sacred text.

And so of course its publication, reprinting was banned

by the occupying authorities, by the Allies.

- The Allies agreed policies at the wartime conferences

at Yalta and Potsdam to denazify and demilitarize Germany,

and also to reeducate the Germans.

So of course, in line with that policy,

they were absolutely determined

to remove all copies of "Mein Kampf"

and particularly to prevent any republication of "Mein Kampf".

The Allies transferred the book's copyright

to the German state of Bavaria

under the condition that reprints would be banned.

Knowing that the expiration of the book's copyright

would come at the beginning of 2016,

the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich,

a very well-regarded research center,

made plans for the publication

of an annotated critical edition of "Mein Kampf."

So they did this really to prevent the publication

of any less well-intentioned versions,

by which I mean those by Neo-Nazi groups

or anti-Semitic individuals or groups.

Obviously this was a very controversial decision

and it did meet with some concerns,

and particularly among the Jewish community.

Although the publication was to some extent controversial,

I think it's an important one

and I think it's important because if we use it carefully

and use it for educational purposes,

then that can only be a good thing

to prevent the rise of ideologies and ideologues.

- Believe in national socialism.

- We can't get away from the fact of its existence

and we have to understand that Hitler used those ideas

to absolutely abhorrent policies

of destruction, war, and genocide.

- [Announcer] The waning weeks of the European War,

the world sees proof of acts of savagery unparalleled in history.

- He was underestimated, he wasn't taken seriously.

And we have people in the world today

who have perhaps similar kinds of ideas or different ideas

but certainly extremist ideas,

and perhaps the lesson we can learn from this

is that they shouldn't be underestimated

and they should be taken seriously.

(soldiers chanting in foreign language)

- There are places similar to Hitler's regime

all over the world.

To different extents, but you only have to look at Russia,

you only have to look at Belarus, you only have to look at China,

you only have to look at North Korea,

and that's just for starters.

It's still with us, it's still with us.

Hitler was, you know, the absolute embodiment

of that form of totalitarianism, but it hasn't gone away.

(crowd cheering)

(ominous music continues)

"Mein Kampf" is always gonna be popular to Neo-Nazis,

cranks, loons, idiots, racists, anti-Semites.

Now having a copy of "Mein Kampf" for these idiots

is gonna be a little badge of honor for them,

like a swastika tattoo.

(people shouting in foreign la)

You can't get rid of it.

You've just gotta accept the fact it's there.

It's a malign influence on people, frankly,

who are already lost to sensible, reasonable politics.

(crowd cheering)

(projector clicks)

(gentle music)

(singing in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language continues)

(music fades out)