Mein Kampf sold slowly until 1933, then was given to every newlywed couple
Hitler drafted Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison after his failed 1923 coup, hoping sales would cover his legal bills. It sold slowly at first, then became a bestseller once he took power in 1933, handed free to newlyweds and soldiers. The book set out the antisemitic ideology that led to the Holocaust.
After the failed Munich putsch of November 1923 and a treason trial in February 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years of fortress confinement and served over a year. He turned his cell time into a manuscript that grew into two volumes, published in 1925 and 1926 and running to roughly 750 pages. Emil Maurice helped transcribe it and Rudolf Hess did most of the editing. Hitler first wanted a sprawling title railing at the lies, cowardice and stupidity he claimed to have battled for four and a half years; his publisher, Max Amann, reportedly proposed the short version.
The core of the book is a conspiracy fantasy about Jews seeking world domination. Hitler describes turning antisemitic during his years in Vienna, treats the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as genuine, blames Germany's troubles on the Weimar parliament, Social Democrats and Marxists, and calls for abolishing parliamentary government. He also demands living space in the East, a plan that foreshadowed Generalplan Ost. The historian Ian Kershaw judged several passages plainly genocidal, although historians disagree on when the decision to murder Europe's Jews was taken, and few put it before the mid-1930s.
The money was considerable. By 1933 Hitler had earned about 1.2 million Reichsmarks from it, at a time when a teacher made roughly 4,800 a year, and he had run up a tax debt of 405,500 on about 240,000 copies. Once chancellor he played the book down as prison daydreams and told Hans Frank he would never have written it had he foreseen his rise, yet by 1939 it had sold 5.2 million copies. Even Benito Mussolini found it dull, and the American critic Kenneth Burke published a 1939 study exposing the aggression in its rhetoric.
After the war the state of Bavaria held the copyright and refused to let it be printed in Germany. When that expired in 2016, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich issued a critical edition of almost 2,000 pages with about 3,500 notes, the first German printing since 1945, which split opinion among Jewish groups. A French edition of nearly 900 pages followed in 2021, carrying roughly twice as much commentary as original text.
Source: Mein Kampf
