This contribution is dedicated to the international distribution and reception of Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” prior to 1945. Apart from the Allied states of World War II, also the Arab countries are dealt with, as well as India, Italy, Japan, China and the Vatican. Apart from the publication history of the book, also the question of its interpretation in the various states is pursued. The idea that the book was a result of the radical atmosphere of the early 1920s and was no longer to be taken seriously in the 1930s was contradicted by solemn warnings that the Reich’s Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, would unswervingly keep to the goals formulated in “Mein Kampf”.

This article argues that there is an astonishing discrepancy between Hitler’s grandiose public behavior and his inhibited process of writing. His author awareness remains quite evasive and it is not confident. While writing “Mein Kampf” at Landsberg, Hitler takes great pains to destroy most of the written evidence by discarding his drafts and sketches. This restrained behavior might be understandable for a not yet established writer. However, after the implimentation of his dictatorship, this behavior gets rather bizarre: While “Mein Kampf” becomes a monolithic and canonical text, it must not be interpreted, commented on, or officially altered at the same time.

Being the incarnation of bourgeois ordinariness, Hitler was not an ingenious seducer but most of all the abysmal German philistine. What made his book “Mein Kampf” so successful was the fact that there was no need to read it. The attitude towards life and ideology of wide parts of the German people were congruent with that what was presented and propagated in “Mein Kampf”. The book offered all that what thrills the philistine: abysmal vulgarities, resentments expressed by inappropriate metaphors, endless rants, rhetorically prettied up platitudes. This way Hitler’s mediocrity became the fate of a nation which allowed him to step by step dissuade it from humanity and culture. The rise of National Socialism did not require any kind of skilful seduction, no ingenious demonism or mendacity. All Hitler had to do was being himself: mediocre, primitive, without any virtues or merits.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” makes obvious that the idea of fighting is crucial for his ideology: Fighting secures the continued xistence and progress of mankind. Ideologies such as Marxism on the other hand, which try to abandon fighting, are the cause of the decline and fall of mankind. Hitler’s own fight was directed against Marxism and its – alleged – Jewish originators. This requires the melting of the people into a fighting community – this provided the basis for Hitler’s programme of Gleichschaltung” and the inner homogenisation of the German nation.

In November, 1938, during a conversation with a South-African politician, which was mostly about the German-British elations in those days, Hitler confessed that meanwhile he had “reluctantly […] started to liquidate the work of his youth”. Against the background of this statement it must be analysed in how far Hitler’s original foreign-political ideas and goals of the mid-1920s had changed until the beginning of the war in 1939. This holds in particular for the prospects of his alliance policy as well as, quite particularly, the intended schedule of the realisation of his power-political intentions.