Podcast
Behind the Bastards
It was written while Hitler was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch, and it became his autobiography and political manifesto, outlining his racist views and plans for German expansion.
By July, Hitler was hard at work on a work that would be both autobiography and political manifesto. The completed work would be called Mein Kampf. It would be 782 pages long and it would sell 12 mill...
— Episode: Behind the Insurrections - Hitler's Muni...
Episode: Behind the Insurrections - Hitler's Munich Beer Ha...
It was written while Hitler was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch, and it became his autobiography and political manifesto, outlining his racist views and plans for German expansion.
By July, Hitler was hard at work on a work that would be both autobiography and political manifesto. The completed work would be called Mein Kampf. It would be 782 pages long and it would sell 12 million copies by 1945.
In the book, Hitler developed the two great themes that would mark his later career. First, he defined world history as a struggle between races and saw Aryans as the culture-creating race and Jews as the culture-destroying race.
Second, he lays out a case for the imperative of German territorial expansion to the east. He called it living space for Germans or Lebensraum.
Hitler said his time in prison gave him that fearless faith, that optimism, that confidence in our destiny, which nothing could shake thereafter.
He said that the prison had given him a frenzy of liberty and that without my imprisonment, Mein Kampf would never have been written.