PBA Galleries

781, [1], [10] ad pp. Illustrated with photographic frontispiece. (8vo) 19.2x13 cm (7½x5"), blue boards with gilt eagle and swastika on front boards and gilt spine title, top edge green.

Frontispiece photo with tissue guard has a facsimile signature with Hitler's original blue ink signature below. A 1996 authentication slip by Harold Keith Thompson is laid in. Thompson (1922-2002) was the author of a 1954 Expose magazine article "I Am an American Fascist" and a book denouncing the Nuremberg trials. He had also been recruited by the SS intelligence unit Sicherheitsdienst in 1941 due to his outspoken sympathy for the Nazis. He later became a New York literary agent and expert on the Third Reich and autographs. Mein Kampf was first published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, and later as one volume. This is the Volksausgabe or first People's Edition, published in 1933, the year Hitler seized power.

Printing & the Mind of Man 415 describes the book at some length: “Political creeds as the basis for new religions have usually spelt danger for humanity. When they are distilled from the half-baked prejudices harboured by the more reactionary section of a nation not particularly noted for political enlightenment, they spell disaster... In November 1923 came the Nazi Putsch in Munich. This, although abortive, had, in its sequel, much to do with Hitler’s rise to national stature. The ill-advised prominence given to his trial, the ineffectiveness with which it was conducted and the dignified nature of his detention in the Fortress of Landsberg transformed his status from that of a seedy local agitator to a potential national saviour. His detention, moreover, gave him the opportunity to dictate to his associate Rudolf Hess the contents of the first volume of the testament and programme of a political gangster which he called Mein Kampf - ‘My Struggle’. Although it contained much that was shocking to many Germans, its main sentiments were widely shared in central Europe. A pseudo-mystic racial theory, totally unrelated to fact, was made to support pan-Germanism, anti-semitism, militarism and ultra-nationalism, the combination of which was to be implemented by the unrestricted use of power as interpreted through the mentality of a superstitious bully. This programme, with a detailed account of what it would entail nationally and internationally, is stated with complete frankness in the two volumes of Mein Kampf... Hitler had a right to be surprised at their violent reaction to the attack on Poland. It was all in Mein Kampf, but they just could not believe it.”