“It isn’t a book to be read through”: The Germans and Mein Kampf, 1925-1945

Did Germans read Mein Kampf too closely? Doing so led to probably the most unpleasant week of his life for Philipp Lohbauer. Born in Nuremberg, the thirty-one year old Munich resident, married with one child and an architect by trade, had been denounced by his former maid, Katharina Haslinger, for insulting the Führer. Arrested in late January 1938, he now faced the prospect of a trial before Munich’s Special Court. Such an offence was hardly exceptional. A mere seven weeks into Hitler’s chancellorship, the 21 March 1933 ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Defence against Malicious Attacks on the Government of the National Uprising’ made so-called “Heimtücke”– damaging statements of fact about, in practice, any aspect of the Nazi movement – a criminal offence, with such cases tried in the ‘Special Courts’, established for that purpose on the same day across the Reich.Footnote1 Fully 1,200 cases of “Heimtücke” turning on remarks about Hitler survive in the files of the Munich Staatsarchiv alone. Unusual was the substance of the case: Lohbauer was accused of having written “insulting marginalia” on no fewer than twenty-nine pages of his copy of Mein Kampf; it was these that were held to represent “a direct libelling of the Führer.”Footnote2 Lohbauer’s house had been searched by the Gestapo on 20 January 1938, in the presence of his (Jewish) wife. The secret police officers had turned up some doubtful literature, noting Lohbauer’s copy of Stalin & Co. by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an author decried by Hitler in Mein Kampf as a “cosmopolitan bastard.”Footnote3 But it was the state of Hitler’s tome which caused them most concern: “upon inspection of the book,” Lohbauer’s copy of the first volume evidenced “a number of marginalia, punctuations and underlinings.” Diligently listed in their report, these comprised both stylistic criticism– “clumsy,” “sentence!,” “incomprehensible,” “kitsch!”–and notes which seemed to pour scorn on the ideas themselves: “quite right, look at 1933!,” “and today?,” “thus one becomes a hater of Jews!”