March 13, 2017 | Leave a comment During his summer holidays in 1958, an American scholar by the name of Gerhard Weinberg (b. 1928), was trawling through German military documents captured by the United States at the end of World War II. His attention was drawn to a folder labelled “Draft of Mein Kampf“. As he began to examine the yellowing 324 page typescript, it quickly became apparent to Weinberg that this was not, as stated, a draft of Hitler’s famous 1925 publication. Gerhard Weinberg (b. 1928) References to an unpublished work by Adolf Hitler had been circulating, and a memoir by one of the Nazi leader’s secretaries, had made mention of a secret book about foreign policy. Whilst of considerable interest to Weinberg, he had no idea where to even start looking for this elusive opus. Imagine his surprise and delight, therefore, when upon reading the opening lines of the pages before him, he quickly realised that this must be the Fuhrer’s missing tome. He later recalled his excitement at the discovery, “This thing in fact existed and was here! It really existed, it had survived. Lots of stuff, after all, had been destroyed.” In addition, the provenance was excellent. A brief report attached to the folder confirmed that it had been handed to an American officer in 1945 by Josef Berg, the manager of the Nazi publishing house, Eher Verlag, who said it had been written at least fifteen years previously. A witness also came forward to confirm that, during the war, Berg had shown him the manuscript of an unpublished book by Adolf Hitler. Additionally, it was apparent from erroneous spaces before commas and full stops, that it had been dictated directly to a person using a typewriter, who had, on occasion, not correctly anticipated what was coming next. This was the method Hitler had employed to dictate Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) So why was this second book not published during the lifetime of the Nazi leader? Apparently, it had been written during the summer of 1928, around three years after the publication of Mein Kampf, which was not, at that time, selling well. Publication of a second book by the same author would have diluted sales of the first, and so it seems the decision not to publish immediately after completion, was a commercial one. The contents of the book may also have been a factor in the decision not to publish it at a later date, after Hitler had risen to power. Apparently things did not pan out quite the way he had anticipated in 1928. What did he say that prevented publication? Numerous things, it seems. Firstly, he attacked a number of right wing politicians in the book, but later aligned himself with them for political purposes, and so was unable to criticise them publicly before his ascent to power. This would not have been a problem after he had become Chancellor, but by that time his foreign policy was somewhat different to the views expressed in his book. The manuscript was never given a title, and so was simply known as Zweites Buch (Second Book). In it, Hitler set out a plan, broken down into a number of stages. Firstly, he envisaged massive rearmament and the forging of alliances with both Italy and the United Kingdom. His rationale for an Anglo-German alliance, was based on the notion that they were natural allies, as the Anglo Saxons, who had invaded and occupied Britain 1500 years earlier, were of Germanic origin. The second stage involved a series of “lightning wars” between Germany, Italy and Britain on the one side, and France and her allies in Eastern Europe on the other. The third stage necessitated the eradication of the communist regime in the Soviet Union. Whilst some of this could be gleaned from his 1925 publication, Mein Kampf, it was presumably deemed not in the best interests of either Hitler or the Nazi Party, to publish new material proposing an alliance with the United Kingdom, especially once it had become apparent that not only was no such accord likely, but that open hostility was a far more probable outcome. In addition, in Zweites Buch he went a stage further. Whilst accepting that, in the short term, the Soviet union would be Germany’s most dangerous opponent, he stated that he regarded the United States of America as the most dangerous potential opponent in the longer term. Whilst somewhat prophetic, it was not a view that Germany would likely have wanted to express publicly, prior to the U.S. actual entry into World War II, in December 1941. He did, however, single out the United States as praiseworthy, owing to their practice of racial segregation, and their adoption of eugenics to improve the genetic quality of the population. From an academic perspective, Weinberg realised that it was important that the book should finally be published. And so it was, that in 1961 Hitler’s Zweites Buch was published in German, on a non-profit making basis. A pirated version was also published in English, although to quote Weinberg, the pirated translation was “lousy”. More than 40 years later, an official English version, translated by Weinberg himself, was eventually published in 2003. Weinberg’s Translation So what was it that had drawn the American scholar to this particular subject? Gerhard Weinberg was born in Hanover, Germany. in the same year as Hitler had written his second book. The problem was, the Weinbergs were Jews, and so as the Nazis rose to power, they had little choice but to leave their homeland. They travelled first to England in 1938, and then onto America, where they arrived in New York by passenger ship in 1940. Weinberg, who later adopted American citizenship, and his immediate family were the lucky ones. As many as six million Jews, including members of Weinberg’s extended family, were murdered; victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution”. The Weinbergs in 1938 Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3603289/Revealed-the-amazing-story-behind-Hitlers-second-book.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweites_Buch