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Adolph Hitler’s hate works put on Net by son of Nazi victims
August 2, 2007 | 10:30 am
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By David Rothman
The Nazis murdered “numerous relatives” of the operator of the Bookyards public domain site in Canada. And Hitler also disrupted the lives of his own parents. His mother, for example, was brought to Germany for forced labor.
But now—wisely, I believe—Bookyards has decided to post the complete works of Adolph Hitler.
I might face legal problems, alas, here in Sonny Bono Land, if I provided a direct link to the collection.
Why the works should go on the Net: Not to diminish the importance of the Holocaust—I’m Jewish and my own family almost certainly lost distant German relatives to it—but genocide unfortunately goes on. What are its perpetrators thinking? Source writings, aka the actual hate documents, can tell us.
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Comments:
Hi
I agree that the Mein Kampf should be made available online.
I’m pretty liberal – like most Jews
It should be put into context however.
How about this? An annotated edition… Hitler’s hate speech explained by Jews… now that would be something.
A side note:
the Holocaust was more than genocide. Genocides do happen and we have to stop them but as far as I know at least they don’t make laws like “(this group of people) cannot by a fishtank because they are an inferior life form”.
Tamas: I totally agree. I couldn’t think of a better use for e-book software with annotation capability. I’d just hope that access to the annotated version, both online and as a file, would be free so that as many people as possible could see it. Ideally the file could appear in many languages. Thanks. David
Unless you get the original Mein Kampf , ( which is not jewed up and made less controversial). Then it’s not even worth reading
I read parts of Mien Kampf when studying history at high school. It was very underwhelming. The ridiculous anti-Semitism is there in buckets, but even a school-boy could see how this was splashed in whenever an explanation was logically required.
There is quite a lot of polemic, but the most interesting part was its constant re-iteration of old (WWI) German Imperial ambitions, many of which ironically enough sounded trivial (reclaiming small border areas which was very different to how WWII actually evolved).
As a piece of literature (if that is the right word for such tripe), it was stodgy fragmented partchwork without an original thought to be found. A matter of button-pushing, bile and racial stupidities all wrapping up Germany’s previous objectives and redressing the 1919 treaty.
In short, publishing it is a very good thing, some neo-nazis will wallow in it, the rest of world will see a little into the mind of man whose hollowness is profound — Charlie Chaplin was right, he was an actor. No-one, I suggest will find an original thought in any of his writings, nor any secrets to his “success”.
Trudi Junge, Hitler’s young, apolitical and naive secretary took down Hitler’s last testament shortly before he committed suicide. She expected some explanation, some concept of what the war was about, and why it had come to the end it had. She was shocked that he had none to give — read Mien Kampf and the big nothing is clear enough from the begining.
A thorough historical annotation would help put things into clearer perspective and actually be very helpful for study and understanding. The banning has been a big mistake IMHO, it has helped maintain an unwarranted mystery about a historical figure whose shallowness is his chief characteristic.