Ben Wilson

He settled on Mein Kampf, My Struggle.

So, um, Hitler writes this in 13 months.

He dictates much of it to Rudolph Hess who served as a kind of voluntary secretary, but other parts of it, he actually wrote.

All right.

So Mein Kampf is the seminal written work of Hitler's life that lays out his thinking from a policy standpoint, as well as his own autobiography and how he understands himself and his relationship to the national socialist movement and to Germany as a nation.

it's not a great literary work, but there are some genuinely compelling parts that would endear an audience to him and helped to create the myth of the Fuhrer and the myth of this great man.

And so I think from that perspective are very effective as propaganda.

And also just as a textbook for how movements are built.

Like,

There are few that are better than Mein Kampf.

Okay, I won't go through all my highlights.

I will do a bonus episode that's just a review of Mein Kampf.

But the important thing to understand is that he's got some interesting thoughts about how to build a movement.

He lays out the intellectual foundations of Nazism, of National Socialism.

and he lays out his plans for the future and what he hopes to accomplish.

For the first time in full, he lays out his concept of Liebensraum, living space in the East.

So what is Liebensraum?

So Hitler is obsessed with the example of America for a few reasons.

Number one, as a child, actually, he was obsessed with Western stories.

He read all these dime store novels about the Wild West and the cowboys and the Indians and all this stuff, and he loved it.