# Mein Kampf *Mein Kampf* ("My Struggle," two volumes, 1925–26) is [[Adolf Hitler]]'s autobiography-manifesto, dictated in comfortable fortress confinement after the failed [[Beer Hall Putsch]]. Turgid, repetitive, and dismissed by contemporaries as unreadable, it nonetheless laid out — **in advance and in public** — the program later executed: annihilationist [[Antisemitism]] (the Jew as parasite, conspirator, and disease, in the *Protocols* tradition), *Lebensraum* conquest in the East at Russia's expense, the destruction of "Judeo-Bolshevism," contempt for parliamentary democracy, and a working theory of [[Propaganda]] — including the passage on the colossal lie that named the technique now catalogued as [[The Big Lie]] (Hitler attributed the method to the Jews; the regime made it policy). For the KB, the book is the standing exhibit for a precept the vault applies broadly: **when movements publish their intentions, believe them**. Two further registers matter. **The American thread:** Hitler praised [[Henry Ford]] by name in volume one, drew on the *[[The International Jew]]* current, and lauded the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 as the model of racially conscious statecraft — part of the documented American input into Nazi race thinking (see [[Nuremberg Laws]]). **The afterlife:** royalties made Hitler rich (by 1945 some 12 million copies were in print, including free copies for newlyweds); after the war Bavaria used its copyright to suppress republication until expiry in 2015, whereupon the Institute for Contemporary History's 2016 critical edition — 3,500 annotations dismantling the text line by line — became a bestseller, the case study in answering a toxic text with apparatus rather than prohibition. Meanwhile unannotated editions circulate freely online and through extremist channels, where the book functions less as read text than as totem — the same role it largely played the first time. ## See Also - [[Adolf Hitler]] — the author and the program's execution - [[The Big Lie]] — the propaganda doctrine named here - [[Antisemitism]] / [[Eliminationist Rhetoric]] — the ideological content - [[The International Jew]] / [[Henry Ford]] — the American input - [[Holocaust]] — the program, executed [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]