Mein Kampf

“ Mein Kampf establishes unequivocally that the use of aggressive war to serve their aims in foreign policy was part of the very creed of the Nazi Party.
A great German philosopher has said that “ideas have hands and feet.” It became the deliberate aim of these defendants to see to it that the ideas, doctrines, and policies of Mein Kampf should become the active faith and guide for action of the German nation, and particularly of its malleable youth. ”

“ And when Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, was published it was our bible which we almost learned by heart in order to answer the questions of the doubters and superior critics. Almost everyone today who is leading youth in a responsible position joined us in those years. ”

“ As far as the book, Mein Kampf, is concerned, my judgment has always been the same from the very beginning as it is today. It is a book written in the worst kind of German, propaganda of a man who was strongly interested in politics, not to say a fanatical, half educated man, which to me Hitler has always been. In the book Mein Kampf and in part also in the Party program there was one point which worried me a great deal, and that was the absolute lack of understanding for all economic problems. ”

“ Does the Russo-German war prove Hitler’s thesis that he was an implacable enemy of Bolshevism? Nonsense! Hitler’s brand of Bolshevism is infinitely more menacing to us all than any produced in Russia. The bibles of the twin regimes, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, preach identical doctrine: Here, hate everybody of a different race; there, hate everybody of a different class. Since Jesus Christ was on earth the Communist Party and the Nazi Party and the states they founded are the first institutions of such dimensions to be built avowedly and officially on hatred. ”

“ A similar view was expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf:
“If one wanted territory in Europe, this could be done on the whole at the expense of Russia, and the new Reich would have to set out to march over the road of the former Knights, in order to give soil to the German plow by means of the German sword, and to give daily bread to the nation.” (2760-A-PS)
In Mein Kampf Hitler threatened war as a means of attaining additional space:
“If this earth really has space (Raum) for all to live in, then we should be given the territory necessary. Of course, one will not do that gladly. ”

“ Hitler stated in Mein Kampf:
“* * * The lack of a great creative idea means at all times an impairment of the fighting spirit. The conviction that it is right to use even the most brutal weapons is always connected with the existence of a fanatical belief that it is necessary that a revolutionary new order of this earth should become victorious. A movement which does not fight for these highest aims and ideals will therefore never resort to the ultimate weapon.” ”

“ The character and quality of Nazi propaganda was fully presaged in Mein Kampf. Here Hitler paid a striking tribute to the power of lies, commenting on—
the very correct principle that the size of the lie always involves a certain factor of credibility, since the great mass of a people will be more spoiled in the innermost depths of its heart, rather than consciously and deliberately bad. ”

“ One blood demands one Reich. Never will the German Nation possess the moral right to engage in Colonial politics until, at least, it embraces its own sons within a single state. Only when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer guarantee his daily bread, will the moral right to acquire foreign soil arise from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.”
Seyss-Inquart devoted his efforts to legalize the sale and circulation of Mein Kampf in Austria. ”

“ The Nazi conspirators disseminated dogmas designed to engender in the masses a deep reverence for the vocation of the warrior and to induce acceptance of the postulate that the waging of war was good and desirable per se. The motive underlying the concerted program of the Nazis to glorify war was disclosed by Hitler in Mein Kampf:
“Thus the question of how to regain German power is not: How shall we manufacture arms?, but: How do we create the spirit which enables a nation to bear arms? If this spirit governs a people, the will finds thousands of ways, each of which ends with a weapon!” ”

“ But the movement is not the temporary appearance of one man. Many years ago, in Mein Kampf I said that National Socialism will put its stamp on the next thousand years of Germany history. You cannot conceive it without National Socialism. ”

“ The Nazi conspirators from their early days expressed their belief in the fundamental importance of controlling the education and training of youth. Hitler stated in Mein Kampf:
“It is precisely our German people, that today broken down, lies defenseless against the kicks of the rest of the world who need that suggestive force that lies in self-confidence. But this self-confidence has to be instilled into the young fellow-citizen from childhood on. His entire education and development has to be directed at giving him the conviction of being absolutely superior to others. ”

“ They do so also that their conduct may be exposed in its naked wickedness. And they do so in the hope that the conscience and good sense of all the world will see the consequences of such conduct and the end to which inevitably it must always lead. Let us once again restore sanity and with it also the sanctity of our obligations towards each other.
6. AGGRESSION AS A BASIC NAZI IDEA: MEIN KAMPF Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which became the Nazi statement of faith, gave to the conspirators adequate foreknowledge of the unlawful aims of the Nazi leadership. ”

“ For all to read there was Mein Kampf, the product of the warped brain of the Führer, and there were the prolific writings and utterances of many other leaders who rose to prominence, some of whom are not sitting in the defendants’ box. And Hitler himself had announced, that the Nazis would use force if necessary to achieve their purposes.
Among these conspirators there were those who, like the Defendants Hess, Rosenberg, and Göring, were associated with Hitler since the very inception of the conspiracy. These men were among the original planners. ”

“ The German papers were even forbidden a few years after 1933 to quote arbitrarily any part of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
At that time, then, I did not believe that I was joining a narrowly defined party but I thought I was joining a movement, a movement which united in itself contrasts such as those between Ley and Funk, between Rosenberg and the Reich bishop; a movement which was variable in its choice of methods; which at one time prohibited the labor of women and at some other time solicited this same labor of women. ”

“ The following are quotations showing the general view held by Hitler and accepted and propagated by the conspirators concerning war and aggression generally. On page 556 of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:
“The soil on which we now live was not a gift bestowed by Heaven on our forefathers. But they had to conquer it by risking their lives. So also in the future our people will not obtain territory, and therewith the means of existence, as a favour from any other people, but will have to win it by the power of a triumphant sword.” ”

“ Italy was to have Europe south of the Danube, and an African empire. Germany to have all north of that river. Mussolini, the Napoleon of the South, little dreaming that by 1941 he would be an old soldier on crutches begging coppers from Hitler, was blind to the emphatic statement in Mein Kampf that there is no room in Europe for two great powers. The rest of the world was still dreaming its dream of the benevolent and beneficent destruction of Socialism everywhere by these apostles of order and discipline. ”

“ It is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its existence must not be subordinated to any aesthetic considerations.”
Hitler’s assumption of an inevitable law of struggle for survival is linked up in Chapter II of Book I of Mein Kampf, with the doctrine of Aryan superiority over other races and the right of Germans in virtue of this superiority to dominate and use other peoples for their own ends. ”

“ From the very start the Nazi leaders emphasized the importance of the SA’s mission to disseminate Nazi doctrines. The responsibility of propagating National Socialist ideology remained constant throughout. This is shown in an excerpt from Mein Kampf in which Hitler declared:
“* * * As the directing idea for the inner training of the Sturmabteilung, the intention was always dominant, aside from all physical education, to teach it to be the unshakeable convinced defender of the National Socialist idea.” ”

“ Even if ours have not read Mein Kampf or been inoculated with the revolutionary spirit of nihilism, they have become "realists" of the same sort, believing only in the tangible rewards of success—money, fame, and power. ”

“ In a later passage in Mein Kampf, at page 344, Hitler applies these general ideas to Germany:
“If in its historical development the German people had possessed the unity of herd instinct by which other people have so much benefited, then the German Reich would probably be mistress of the globe today. World history would have taken another course, and in this case no man can tell if what many blinded pacifists hope to attain by petitioning, whining and crying may not have been reached in this way ”

“ But de Gobineau and Chamberlain remained the apostles of the German racial theories even in their frantic efforts to prove that Jesus was not a Jew.
Once more we find that Mein Kampf is no original work. It reveals itself as a puerile anthology of theories absorbed and accepted by Germans before Hitler was born. The race theories in Mein Kampf are mere paraphrases of de Gobineau and Chamberlain. It states : "Human culture and civilization on this earth are inseparably bound up with the existence of the Aryan. ”

“ I brought Frank’s diary to your attention, Your Honors, because he was one of Hitler’s closest associates and because this very well-known “learned” jurist of fascism was actually a positive alter ego of those who cut in two the bodies of children in the Yanov Camp. At the same time he was one of the creators of that part of the legal code of the German fascists which completely negated justice. After all, the whole miserable juridical wisdom of Mein Kampf fundamentally comes down to just one wicked formula, that is, that “might is right.” ”

“ In every attempt to set up a second military power on Germany’s borders, even if it were in the shape of a state which might possibly acquire that power, you must see an attack on Germany.”
War to reconquer the territories lost in 1919, war to annihilate the power of France, war to acquire living space in eastern Europe, war, finally, against any state which would be or which might become a counter-weight to the hegemony of the Reich, that is the plan of Mein Kampf. ”

“ As a result of the efforts of the defendants and their confederates, this book poisoned a generation and distorted the outlook of a whole people.
As the SS General Von dem Bach-Zelewski indicated yesterday, if you preach for years, as long as 10 years, that the Slav peoples are inferior races and that the Jews are subhuman, then it must logically follow that the killing of millions of these human beings is accepted as a natural phenomenon.
From Mein Kampf the way leads directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz and the gas chambers of Maidanek. ”

“ He intends that they shall rule the world during his lifetime. He includes the United States in the world he intends to rule.
Finally, he does have the power to carry out his world conquest unless we fight him in time. That is the shortest way to put it. The reason you think it hard to understand or find out what Hitler means is that you refuse to believe these things because they upset you, and if you believed them then you might have to work harder, or sacrifice something such as your automobile, or blood, or maybe your life. Read Mein Kampf. It is all there. ”

“ They were already anticipating, indeed, the last stage of Hitler’s policy as expounded in Mein Kampf—war to destroy France and to secure Lebensraum in Russia. And the writer of the minute to Ribbentrop already took it for granted that, after Czechoslovakia, Poland would be attacked. But more impressive than those two documents is the fact that, as I have said, at the conference of 5 November 1937, war with Poland, if she should dare to prevent German aggression against Czechoslovakia, had been quite coolly and calmly contemplated, and the Nazi leaders were ready to take the risk. ”

“ It might as well be said that it is impossible to infer that a man is attached to the principles of a religious movement from the fact that he conducts its prayer meetings, or, to take a more sinister example, that it could not be inferred that a man is a Nazi and consequently not attached to constitutional principles who, for more than five years, had diligently circulated the doctrines of Mein Kampf. ”

“ Hitler was definitely and irrevocably committed to waging aggressive war. If Schacht ever had any doubts concerning Hitler’s firm resolve to carry out the program of aggressive war outlined in Mein Kampf ”

“ At the same time it engaged in feverish activity to expand the Party membership, its organizational structure and activities. The SA and the SS recruited numerous new members. Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in 1925. The Hitler Youth was founded. Newspapers were published, among them the Völkischer Beobachter of which the Defendant Rosenberg was editor, and Der Angriff published by Goebbels, later the notorious Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. ”