MEIN KAMPF - ADOLF HITLER, ebook
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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
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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
Germany’s Deepest Humiliation’, Which is referred to again and again by
Hitler.
In 1806 a pamphlet entitled ‘Germany’s Deepest Humiliation’ was published in
South Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the
Nürnberg 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 Napoleon’s 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 Schlageter’s 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
Schlageter’s 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 Translator’s 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
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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 Homer’s 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 Angelo’s Moses; or even that his skin, to which
the epithet Behorned refers, was hard like a crocodile’s, 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 Schiller’s Wallenstein.
11) The Second Infantry Bavarian Regiment, in which Hitler served as a
volunteer.
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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 Thermopylæ recalled as the prototype
of German valour in the Great War. Hitler’s quotation is a German variant of the
couplet inscribed on the monument erected at Thermopylæ 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 latter’s 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 man’s 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.
This element he called Alcahest. If it could be found it would prove to be at
once the philosopher’s stone, the universal medicine and the irresistible solvent.
There are many aspects of his teaching which are now looked upon as by no
means so fantastic as they were considered in his own time.
17) The Battle of Leipzig (1813), where the Germans inflicted an overwhelming
defeat on Napoleon, was the decisive event which put an end to the French
occupation of Germany.
The occupation had lasted about twenty years. After the Great War, and the
partial occupation of Germany once again by French forces, the Germans used
to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig as a symbol of their
yearning.
18) The flag of the German Empire, founded in 1871, was Black-White-Red.
This was discarded in 1918 and Black-Red-Gold was chosen as the flag of the
German Republic founded at Weimar in 1919. The flag designed by Hitler - red
with a white disc in the centre, bearing the black swastika - is now the national
flag.
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