[2][3] Hitler began Mein Kampf while imprisoned following his failed coup in Munich in November 1923 and a trial in February 1924 for high treason, in which he received a sentence of five years.

In 2016, following the expiry of the copyright held by the Bavarian state government, Mein Kampf was republished in Germany for the first time since 1945, which prompted public debate and divided reactions from Jewish groups.

[7] Hitler originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).

[16] Hitler wrote "the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated",[17] and he suggested that, "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.

[19] Hitler described that, when he was in Vienna, it was repugnant for him to see the mixture of races "of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats, and always that infection which dissolves human society, the Jew, were all here and there and everywhere.

[22] Hitler believed that "the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race.

"[23] In Mein Kampf, Hitler openly described his proposed future German expansion in the East, foreshadowing Generalplan Ost: And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-[First World] War period.

(Two other books written by party members, Gottfried Feder's Breaking The Interest Slavery and Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, have since lapsed into comparative literary obscurity.

He dismissed it as "fantasies behind bars" that were little more than a series of articles for the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper, and later told Hans Frank that "If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book.

[31] The American literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke wrote a 1939 analysis of the work, The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle", pointing out an underlying message of aggressive intent.

In essence, Orwell notes, Hitler offers only visions of endless struggle and conflict in the creation of "a horrible brainless empire" that "stretch[es] to Afghanistan or thereabouts".

National Socialism envisages abolishing the difference in wealth, education, intellect, taste, philosophy, and habits by a leveling process which necessitates in turn a total control over the child and the adolescent.

[38]In his The Second World War, published in several volumes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Winston Churchill wrote that he felt that after Hitler's ascension to power, no other book than Mein Kampf deserved more intensive scrutiny.

[39] The critic George Steiner suggested that Mein Kampf can be seen as one of several books that resulted from the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I, comparable in this respect to the philosopher Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia (1918), the historian Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), the theologian Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1921), the theologian Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1922), and the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927).

This evaluation of the poor quality of Hitler's prose and his inability to express his opinions coherently was shared by William S. Schlamm, who reviewed Manheim's translation in The New York Times, writing that "there was not the faintest similarity to a thought and barely a trace of language.

On 3 February 2010, the Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich announced plans to re-publish an annotated version of the text, for educational purposes in schools and universities, in 2015.

[42] The IfZ argued that re-publication was necessary to get an authoritative annotated edition by the time the copyright ran out, which might open the way for neo-Nazi groups to publish their own versions.

[44] However, the Bavarian Science Minister Wolfgang Heubisch supported a critical edition, stating in 2010: "Once Bavaria's copyright expires, there is the danger of charlatans and neo-Nazis appropriating this infamous book for themselves.

[52] Gerhard Weinberg wrote a generally positive review of the annotated edition, praising the choice to include not only editors' comments but also changes of the original text.

On the negative side, Weinberg observed that the editors make a false correction at one point; that they miss an informative book on German atrocities during World War I; that they include a survey of Nazi membership too late; and that all of his own work on Hitler goes unmentioned in the bibliography.

At the time of his suicide, Hitler's official place of residence was in Munich, which led to his entire estate, including all rights to Mein Kampf, changing to the ownership of the state of Bavaria.

In particular, the unmodified edition is not covered by §86 StGB that forbids dissemination of means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations, since it is a "pre-constitutional work" and as such cannot be opposed to the free and democratic basic order, according to a 1979 decision of the Federal Court of Justice of Germany.

In 2008, Stephan Kramer, secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, not only recommended lifting the ban, but volunteered the help of his organization in editing and annotating the text, saying that it is time for the book to be made available to all online.

[58] In a court ruling against the publisher's operator, the distribution of the unabridged, uncommented version of Mein Kampf was classified as Incitement of masses in accordance with Section 130 of the German Criminal Code.

In the 1970s, the rise of the extreme right in France along with the growing of Holocaust denial works, placed Mein Kampf under judicial watch, and in 1978 LICRA entered a complaint in the courts against the publisher for inciting antisemitism.

[79][80] In April 2018, multiple Russian-language news sites (Baltnews, Zvezda, Sputnik, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Komprava among others) reported that Adolf Hitler had allegedly become more popular in Latvia than Harry Potter, referring to a Latvian online book trading platform ibook.lv, where Mein Kampf had appeared at the No.

[citation needed] On 20 April 1993, under the sponsorship of the vice-president of the Democratic Agrarian Party of Romania, Sibiu-based Pacific publishers began issuing a Romanian edition of Mein Kampf.

Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen protested, and on 10 July 1993 President Ion Iliescu asked the Prosecutor General in writing to reinstate the ban of further printing and have the book withdrawn from the market.

[98] In 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reported that it was having difficulty finding a charity that would accept profits from the sales of its version of Mein Kampf, which it had promised to donate.

The authenticity of the document found in 1945 has been verified by Josef Berg, a former employee of the Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag, and Telford Taylor, a former brigadier general of the United States Army Reserve and Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.