Adolf Hitler

What Hitler Actually Wrote

In Mein Kampf, written in 1924 and published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, Hitler set out an autobiographical account combined with a political program built around racial antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and the demand for German territorial expansion — using, among other terms, the concept of Lebensraum to describe the additional territory he argued Germany required, principally in Eastern Europe. The book combined conspiratorial antisemitic claims with a program for restructuring German society and state along racial and authoritarian lines. As a political and later governmental leader, Hitler’s subsequent decisions and public statements as Chancellor (from January 1933) and Führer (from August 1934, following the death of President Hindenburg) are documented primarily through government records, speeches, and contemporaneous accounts rather than further major published works.

Historical Role

As leader of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and then head of the German state, Hitler oversaw the dismantling of German democratic institutions, the implementation of racial laws including the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the remilitarization and territorial expansion of Germany, and the initiation of the Second World War in September 1939. Among the documented actions taken under his direct authority was the authorization of the so-called Aktion T4 program, a campaign to kill patients in psychiatric institutions and other people with disabilities judged by the regime to be “unworthy of life.” Historian Henry Friedlander and others have documented that Hitler signed a brief authorization note, on his personal stationery, empowering Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler and his personal physician Karl Brandt to extend the authority of designated physicians to grant a “mercy death” to patients assessed as incurably ill; the note was dated October 1939 but backdated to September 1, 1939, to coincide with the outbreak of war.

Disputed Scholarly Interpretation

Historians differ on some specific questions of causation and chronology within Hitler’s rule — for example, the degree to which the Holocaust followed a single, long-premeditated plan (an “intentionalist” reading) versus emerging through a cumulative radicalization of policy driven by competing agencies within the regime (a “functionalist” reading), a debate associated with historians including Ian Kershaw. There is no comparable scholarly dispute over the basic facts of Hitler’s formal authority over the Nazi state, his authorship of Mein Kampf, or his direct written authorization of the T4 program; these are established through surviving government documents and are treated as settled historical fact in the specialist literature.

Documented Consequences

Hitler’s October 1939 authorization note is documented in this archive’s record of the killing program it initiated, at Aktion T4.

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