HitlerAdolf - Mein Kampf

MEIN KAMPF

HURST AND BLACKETT LTD.,

Publishers since 1812

LONDON NEW YORK MELBOURNE

This translation of the unexpurgated edition of "Mein Kampf"

was first published on March 21st, 1939

CHAPTER III: CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS OF THE STATE

FOOT NOTES

1) In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later portions of Mein Kampf, the following must be borne in mind: From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800

Bavaria shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805 the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men.

Thus Bavaria became the absolute vassal of the French. This was The Time of Germanys Deepest Humiliation, Which is referred to again and again by Hitler.

In 1806 a pamphlet entitled Germanys Deepest Humiliation was published in South Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nrnberg bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose the name of the author. By Napoleons orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Inn on August 26th, 1806. A monument erected to him on the site of the execution was one of the first public objects that made an impression on Hitler as a little boy.

Leo Schlageters case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm.

Schlageter was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes.

When the French occupied the Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side. He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the transport of coal to France more difficult.

Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer. Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made, to him on Schlageters behalf and that he refused to interfere.

Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the French occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership bearing the number 61.

2) Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and Gymnasium were classical or semiclassical secondary schools.

3) See Translators Introduction.

4) When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the 3

Crown and Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands to have the Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded.

Hitler had them brought to Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party Congress in September 1938.

5) The Phaecians were a legendary people, mentioned in Homers Odyssey.

They were supposed to live on some unknown island in the Eastern Mediterranean, sometimes suggested to be Corcyra, the modern Corfu. They loved good living more than work, and so the name Phaecian has come to be a synonym for parasite.

6) Spottgeburt von Dreck und Feuer. This is the epithet that Faust hurls at Mephistopheles as the latter intrudes on the conversation between Faust and Martha in the garden: Mephistopheles: Thou, full of sensual, super-sensual desire, A girl by the nose is leading thee. Faust: Abortion, thou of filth and fire.

7) Herodotus (Book VII, 213-218) tells the story of how a Greek traitor, Ephialtes, helped the Persian invaders at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) When the Persian King, Xerxes, had begun to despair of being able to break through the Greek defence, Ephialtes came to him and, on being promised a definite payment, told the King of a pathway over the shoulder of the mountain to the Greek end of the Pass. The bargain being clinched, Ephialtes led a detachment of the Persian troops under General Hydarnes over the mountain pathway. Thus taken in the rear, the Greek defenders, under Leonidas, King of Sparta, had to fight in two opposite directions within the narrow pass. Terrible slaughter ensued and Leonidas fell in the thick of the fighting.

The bravery of Leonidas and the treason of Ephialtes impressed Hitler, as it does almost every schoolboy. The incident is referred to again in Mein Kampf (Chap.

VIII, Vol. I), where Hitler compares the German troops that fell in France and Flanders to the Greeks at Thermopylae, the treachery of Ephialtes being suggested as the prototype of the defeatist policy of the German politicians towards the end of the Great War.

8) German Austria was the East Mark on the South and East Prussia was the East Mark on the North.

9) Carlyle explains the epithet thus: "First then, let no one from the title Gehoernte (Horned, Behorned), fancy that our brave Siegfried, who was the loveliest as well as the bravest of men, was actually cornuted, and had horns on his brow, though like Michael Angelos Moses; or even that his skin, to which the epithet Behorned refers, was hard like a crocodiles, and not softer than the softest shamey, for the truth is, his Hornedness means only an Invulnerability, like that of Achilles"

10) Lines quoted from the Song of the Curassiers in Schillers Wallenstein.

11) The Second Infantry Bavarian Regiment, in which Hitler served as a volunteer.

12) Schwabing is the artistic quarter in Munich where artists have their studios and litterateurs, especially of the Bohemian class, foregather.

13) Here again we have the defenders of Thermopyl recalled as the prototype of German valour in the Great War. Hitlers quotation is a German variant of the couplet inscribed on the monument erected at Thermopyl to the memory of Leonidas and his Spartan soldiers who fell defending the Pass. As given by Herodotus, who claims that he saw the inscription himself, the original text may be literally translated thus:

Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passeth by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

14)Swedish Chancellor who took over the reins of Government after the death of Gustavus Adolphus

15) When Mephistopheles first appears to Faust, in the latters study, Faust inquires: "What is thy name?" To which Mephistopheles replies: "A part of the Power which always wills the Bad and always works the Good." And when Faust asks him what is meant by this riddle and why he should call himself a part, the gist of Mephistopheles reply is that he is the Spirit of Negation and exists through opposition to the positive Truth and Order and Beauty which proceed from the never-ending creative energy of the Deity. In the Prologue to Faust the Lord declares that mans active nature would grow sluggish in working the good and that therefore he has to be aroused by the Spirit of Opposition. This Spirit wills the Bad, but of itself it can do nothing positive, and by its opposition always works the opposite of what it wills.

16) The last and most famous of the medieval alchemists. He was born at Basle about the year 1490 and died at Salzburg in 1541. He taught that all metals could be transmuted through the action of one primary element common to them all.