Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.

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Mein Kampf (German)

Illustration, not an archive object

Content note: Sets out an antisemitic and racist ideology, uses dehumanising language about Jews and other groups, and argues for war, conquest and the removal of political opponents. This object is shown as it was published. Why

Adolf Hitler wrote the first volume in 1924 while serving a sentence at Landsberg for the failed Munich putsch of November 1923, and the second followed in 1925 and 1926. Volume 1 is part life story and part argument about Germany's defeat and the revolution of 1918 and the causes he assigned to them; volume 2 sets out the National Socialist programme and how the party should be organised. It includes his chapters on propaganda: on the war propaganda of the Allies (volume 1, chapter 6) and on propaganda and organisation (volume 2, chapter 11). The Reich Ministry page in the archive discusses how the party and the state later used those ideas, and the case studies on the early NSDAP and the Nuremberg rallies cite it for his own stated intent.

The book is hosted here because the archive's rule is to show the record as it was. It sets out an ideology of antisemitism and racial hierarchy and plans for war and conquest, and the wording is reproduced as printed, apart from the mechanical changes listed under provenance. The archive quotes the book in the write-ups for the historical record and does not endorse it.

Which text this is. The 1925 and 1926 first editions are the works in the public domain. The archive could not obtain a scan of them, so this text comes from the 1943 printing, machine-read and not compared with the first editions. The 1930 popular edition corrected the first editions, and later printings changed a little more; the Institut für Zeitgeschichte's critical edition (2016) collates seven printings, and its notes are the place to check what changed (Historisches Lexikon Bayerns on the 1925/26 edition; IfZ critical edition). The page says so instead of presenting it as the 1925 text. If a first-edition scan turns up, the archive will replace this text with it.

English translations. Two are in wide use, and neither is hosted here. James Murphy's 1939 translation (Hurst and Blackett) is out of copyright in Australia, and Project Gutenberg Australia carries it: Murphy translation, plain text. It is not hosted here because its United States copyright was probably restored until 2034, and that has not been checked further. Ralph Manheim's 1943 translation (Houghton Mifflin) is in copyright and is available from libraries and the publisher.

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Download as plain text 217,662 words, with the provenance header above the text

Provenance and rights

Edition
Mein Kampf, two volumes in one ("Ungekürzte Ausgabe"). Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., 1943, 851st to 855th printing; the text is that of the 855th. First published as volume 1, Eine Abrechnung (1925), and volume 2, Die nationalsozialistische Bewegung (1926, dated 1927 on the title page).
Text source
Internet Archive, item Mein-Kampf2 (855th printing, 1943)
Text basis
Machine-read (OCR) text of a 1943 printing, not proofread and not compared with the 1925 and 1926 first editions.
Rights
Volume 1 was first published in Munich in 1925 and volume 2 in 1926, so the work is in the public domain in the United States (published more than 95 years ago) and in Germany (Hitler died in 1945, so the term ran out at the end of 2015). The text here is from a 1943 printing. It descends from the one-volume popular edition of 7 May 1930, which reworked the first editions with editorial corrections (Historisches Lexikon Bayerns), and printings up to 1944 carry occasional further minor changes. Text published in 1930 or earlier is in the public domain in the United States; any wording added after 1930 was still protected in Germany in 1996 and could have had its United States copyright restored to 95 years from publication (to 2038 for a 1943 change). This text has not been collated with the first editions or with the 1930 edition, so the archive cannot say whether such changes exist here. The publisher's 1943 index and contents pages are left out. Checked September 29, 2026.
Changes made
Machine-read (OCR) text, not proofread: recognition errors (for example spaced-out letters where the book sets a word in spaced type, or a wrong capital after a line-end hyphen) are the scan's, not edits. Left out: the publisher's contents pages, the person-and-subject index and the advertisements. Page numbers and running heads removed, line-end hyphens resolved, some paragraph breaks the OCR lost restored, and quotation marks the OCR read as straight quotes set as „ “. Nothing translated or reworded.
Source file checksum
d81b4ecd9bce7028… (SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)

Where it appears in the archive