Chapter XXVIII: Book I (3)

The Tribunal will see, at the bottom of the page opposite to the contents page, that that edition of _Mein Kampf_, which was the 1940 edition, brought the number of copies of _Mein Kampf_ published to 6,250,000. This was the scale upon which this book was distributed. It was blasphemously called “the bible of the German people”.

As a result of the efforts of the defendants and their confederates, this book poisoned a generation and distorted the outlook of a whole people.

As the SS General Von dem Bach-Zelewski indicated yesterday, if you preach for years, as long as 10 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 I shall seek to indicate to the Tribunal by quotations from the book, which are set out in the extracts which I trust are now before the Tribunal. Those extracts are set out in the order in which I shall, with the Tribunal’s permission, refer to them.

Now these quotations 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 must 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 that fact will be realized if the Tribunal looks at the German edition of _Mein Kampf_. The Tribunal will observe that Part II of _Mein Kampf_ was first published in 1927, that is to say, less than 2 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 co-operation embarked upon by Stresemann and as a deliberate defiance of the attempt to establish, through the League of Nations, the rule of law in international affairs.

First I place before the Tribunal some quotations showing the general views held by Hitler and accepted and propagated by the defendants about war and aggression generally. The first quotation, from Page 556 of _Mein Kampf_, reads:

“The soil on which we now live was not a gift bestowed by Heaven
on our forefathers. But they had to conquer it by risking their
lives. So also in the future our people will not obtain
territory and therewith the means of existence as a favor from
any other people, but will have to win it by the power of a
triumphant sword.”

On Page 145 Hitler revealed his own personal attitude to war. Of the years of peace before 1914 he wrote:

“Thus I used to think it an ill-deserved stroke of bad luck that
I had arrived too late on this terrestrial globe, and I felt
chagrined at the idea that my life would have to run its course
along peaceful and orderly lines. As a boy I was anything but a
pacifist and all attempts to make me so proved futile.”

Generally, Hitler wrote of war in this way. On Page 162 we find:

“In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated
that in time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as
quickly as possible and that the most ruthless methods of
fighting are at the same time the most humane. When people
attempt to answer this reasoning by ‘highfalutin’ talk about
aesthetics, _et cetera_, only one answer can be given. It is
that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation
for its existence must not be subordinated to any aesthetic
consideration.”

How faithfully these precepts of ruthlessness were followed by the defendants the Prosecution will prove in the course of this Trial.

Hitler’s assumption of an inevitable law of struggle for survival linked up in Chapter 11 of Book I of _Mein Kampf_, with the doctrine of Aryan superiority over other races and the right of Germans, in virtue of this superiority, to dominate and use other peoples as instruments for their own ends. The whole of Chapter 11 of _Mein Kampf_ is dedicated to this master race theory, and, indeed, many of the later speeches of Hitler, his addresses to his generals and so forth, were mainly repetitive of