Abstract
In an article on Hitler’s desire for world domination, Milan Hauner, following Karl Dietrich Bracher, noted that one of the biggest problems of National Socialism ‘is that of its fundamental underrating’. As an example of this underrating, Hauner referred to Mein Kampf. He claimed that ‘in spite of its explosive content, or perhaps precisely because of its extraordinary verbosity, Mein Kampf was never taken seriously outside Germany’.2 Indeed, even many Germans held the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf to be irrelevant; Franz Neumann, for example, in his classic study of the Third Reich, Behemoth (1942), argued that ‘National Socialism has no political theory of its own, and that the ideologies it uses or discards are mere arcana dominationis, techniques of domination.’ He did, however, note that this meant ‘that the German leadership is the only group in present German society that does not take its ideological pronouncements seriously and is well aware of their purely propagandistic nature’.3 In this chapter, I show that, whilst the thrust of mainstream liberal thinking in Britain confirms Hauner’s position, there were nevertheless significant attempts made to alert the British public to the seriousness of Hitler’s intent as expressed in his Landsberg bible. I do so not to propose a naïve ‘intentionalism’ with respect to the Holocaust or to Nazi policies more generally but in order to throw some light on the way in which Nazism was understood in the years before World War II. Those in Britain who argued that Hitler’s writings of the mid-1920s should be taken seriously as a guide to his plans as Chancellor of Germany were in a distinct minority.
To pronounce an opinion on the present state of Europe without having read Mein Kampf, is like looking for the North Pole without troubling to take a compass.
Evan John1
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Notes
Evan John, Answer to Hitler: Reflections on Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and on Some Recent Events Upon the Continent of Europe (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1939), 6.
Milan Hauner, ‘Did Hitler Want a World Dominion?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13, 1 (1978), 16.
On the reception of Mein Kampf in Germany see Werner Maser, Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf: Geschichte, Auszüge, Kommentare (Esslingen: Bechtle, 1974);
G. Schreiber, Hitler-Interpretationen 1923–1983: Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988);
Barbara Zehnpfennig, Hitlers Mein Kampf: Eine Interpretation (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002);
Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’ 1922–1945 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006). Maser,
Schreiber and Plöckinger also deal with the reception of Mein Kampf in other countries, as does Detlev Clemens, Herr Hitler in Germany: Wahrnehmung und Deutungen des Nationalsozialismus in Großbritannien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 330–43, though none mentions Lorimer.
Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), 381. Neumann’s position was a reflection of his orthodox Marxism; as he wrote to T.W. Adorno in 1940, ‘I can imagine, and I have done this in my book, that one can represent National Socialism without attributing to the Jewish problem a central role.’
Cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘“Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?” The Place of Antisemitism in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment’, in Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (eds.), Adorno: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 136–37. For an attempt to take Hitler seriously as a thinker,
see Lawrence Birken, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).
E.O. Lorimer, What Hitler Wants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939 [Penguin Special no. 13]), 36, citing her notes from 31 October 1932. Henceforth referred to in the text as WHW.
See Calvin B. Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 95.
For a good contemporary discussion of Moeller van den Bruck, see Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938).
‘Translator’s Note’, Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, trans. E.O. Lorimer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), n.p.
See, for example, Ewald Banse, Germany, Prepare for War!, trans. Alan Harris (London: Lovat Dickson, 1935);
Edgar Mowrer, Germany Puts the Clock Back (London: John Lane, 1933); Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich;
Robert Dell, Germany Unmasked (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934);
Leland Stowe, Nazi Germany Means War (London: Faber & Faber, 1933);
Dorothy Woodman, Hitler Rearms: An Exposure of Germany’s War Aims (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1934);
Vernon Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933);
Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism (London: Methuen & Co., 1934);
Wickham Steed, The Meaning of Hitlerism (London: Nisbet & Co., 1934); The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936).
For a discussion of these and other contemporaries see Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933).
Philip Guedalla, The Jewish Past: Presidential Address Delivered Before the Jewish Historical Society of England in the Botanical Theatre, University College London, 21 November, 1938 (London, 1939), 7.
Germany’s Foreign Policy as Stated in Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (London: Friends of Europe, 1936), FoE pamphlet 38, with a preface by the Duchess of Atholl. Lorimer cites Atholl’s foreword in WHW, 10: ‘The English edition … is only about one-third of Mein Kampf. … It unblushingly mistranslates passages of which an accurate rendering would have been disconcerting to English readers. No one therefore who reads My Struggle can have any idea of the foreign policy set forth in the original.’ R.C.K. Ensor, Hitler’s Self-Disclosure in Mein Kampf, Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939); idem., ‘Review of Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition’, Spectator (24 March 1939). This was not entirely fair. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes note in Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History 1930–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 13–14, that in Dugdale’s translation, ‘Above all, he [Hitler] is presented so as not to appear ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Notwithstanding this whitewash, Hitler’s main ideas and policies remain intact, including foreign expansion in the future; the rebuilding of German idealism and self-confidence; Germany’s need for strong leadership; the need to manipulate the mass electorate through propaganda; the eternal struggle against Bolshevism and the Jews; the ultimate repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles; and the role which the Nazis hoped to play in the rebirth of the German state.’ For other relevant contemporary discussions of Mein Kampf, mostly from outside Britain,
see: C. Appuhn, Hitler par lui-même d’après son livre ‘Mein Kampf’ (Paris: Haumont, 1933);
Irene Hamand, His Struggle: An Answer to Hitler (Chicago: Artcraft Press, 1937);
Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Our Battle: Being One Man’s Answer to My Battle (Mein Kampf) by Adolf Hitler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938);
Herbert N. Casson, L’Europe après Hitler. La réponse à Mein Kampf (Brussels: np, c. 1938);
A.P. Mayville, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Present War: A Critical Survey of the Nazi Bible of Hate and Its Effect on Pre-War Events in Germany from Which Emanated the Impending Cataclysm of the World (New York: American Goodwill Association, 1939); John, Answer to Hitler;
Karl Billinger, Hitler Is No Fool: The Menace of the Man and His Program (New York: Modern Age Books, 1939);
Francis Hackett, What ‘Mein Kampf’ Means to America (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941).
Mein Kampf also inspired other rejoinders such as Richard Acland, Unser Kampf: Our Struggle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940 [Penguin Special no. 54]),
the curious Richard Ferrar Patterson, Mein Rant: A Summary in Light Verse of ‘Mein Kampf’ (London: Blackie & Son, 1940), and the hilarious Unexpurgated, Unpurged, Unspeakable Edition of Mein Rampf (Little Goering, Gobbles: Fumpf & Itmar, A.G., 1939).
E.T.S. Dugdale, ‘National Socialism in Germany’, English Review, 53 (1931), 566–67. And for more on Dugdale see Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, 2–8. Barnes and Barnes do not mention Lorimer in their otherwise quite thorough survey.
Letter from Arnold Hyde in Manchester Guardian (19 October 1938).
New English Weekly (20 April 1939). On NEW see Philip Conford, ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry: The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939–1949’, Agricultural History Review, 46, 2 (1998), 197–210.
Hyde to Lorimer, 30 April 1939, F177/51. For examples of authors for whom such conclusions were neither ‘inconceivable’ nor ‘rather dramatic’ see James Strachey, The Menace of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933);
W.A. Rudlin, The Growth of Fascism in Great Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935);
G.T. Garratt, The Shadow of the Swastika (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938).
See also Christina Bussfeld, ‘Democracy versus Dictatorship’: Die Herausforderung des Faschismus und Kommunismus in Großbritannien 1932–1937 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 167–94.
Ibid. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition, trans. James Murphy (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939).
E.O. Lorimer, What the German Needs (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942); For Lorimer’s 1943 articles for ‘Miniform’ — ‘We — the Germans’; ‘The Soul of the German’; ‘Two Protectorates’; ‘The Religion of the Germans Is the Religion of Satan’; ‘Two World Wars’ — see F177/76. For Vansittart’s views see his Black Record: Germans, Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941).
The best discussion is in E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5: ‘The Battle of the Books’.
King’s College, London, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Bryant Papers C41 and C49. See Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939, 144–45, for a fuller discussion. On Ashridge and its role in interwar Conservatism, see Clarisse Berthezène, ‘Creating Conservative Fabians: The Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College’, Past and Present, 182 (2004), 211–40.
Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory (London: Macmillan, 1940); Time and Tide, 10 February 1940. For a discussion of the reception of Unfinished Victory and of Bryant’s relationship with Macmillan
see Richard Griffiths, ‘The Reception of Bryant’s Unfinished Victory: Insights into British Public Opinion in Early 1940’, Patterns of Prejudice, 38, 1 (2004), 18–36.
‘Review of Anthony M. Ludovici, The Future of Women and Ray Strachey, ed., Our Freedom and Its Results’, Listener (6 January 1937). On Ludovici see Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), ch. 2.
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Stone, D. (2013). The Mein Kampf Ramp: Emily Overend Lorimer and the Publication of Mein Kampf in Britain. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_7
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