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. It was not only Hitler’s political testament; by adoption it became theirs.
Mein Kampf may be described as the blueprint of the Nazi aggression. Its whole tenor and content demonstrate that the Nazi pursuit of aggressive designs was no mere accident arising out of an immediate political situation in Europe and the world. Mein Kampf establishes unequivocally that the use of aggressive war to serve German aims in foreign policy was part of the very creed of the Nazi party.
A great German philosopher once said that ideas have hands and feet. It became the deliberate aim of the conspirators to see to it that the idea, 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. From 1933 to 1939 an extensive indoctrination in the ideas of Mein Kampf was pursued in the schools and universities of Germany, as well as in the Hitler Youth, under the direction of Baldur von Schirach, and in the SA and SS, and amongst the German population as a whole, by the agency of Rosenberg.
A copy of Mein Kampf was officially presented by the Nazis to all newly married couples in Germany. [A copy of Mein Kampf (D-660) submitted by the prosecution to the tribunal contains the following dedication on the fly-leaf:
“To the newly married couple, Friedrich Rosebrock and Else Geborene Zum Beck, with best wishes for a happy and blessed marriage. Presented by the Communal Administration on the occasion of their marriage on the 14th of November, 1940. For the Mayor, the Registrar.”
This copy of Mein Kampf, which was the 1945 edition, contains the information that the number of copies published to date amount to 6,250,000.]
As a result of the efforts of the conspirators, this book, blasphemously called “The Bible of the German people,” poisoned a generation and distorted the outlook of a whole people. For as the SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski testified before the Tribunal, [on 7 January 1946] if it is preached for years, as long as ten 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.
What the commandments of Mein Kampf were may be indicated by quotations from the book which fall into two main categories. The first category is that of general expression of Hitler’s belief in the necessity of force as the means of solving international problems. The second category is that of Hitler’s more explicit declarations on the policy which Germany should pursue.
Most of the quotations in the second category come from the last three chapters—13, 14, and 15—of Part II of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler’s views on foreign policy were expounded. The significance of this may be grasped from the fact that Part II of Mein Kampf was first published in 1927, less than two years after the Locarno Pact and within a few months of Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. The date of the publication of these passages, therefore, brands them as a repudiation of the policy of international cooperation embarked upon by Stresseman, and as a deliberate defiance of the attempt to establish, through the League of Nations, the rule of law in international affairs.