Books: Mein Kampf Illustrated

MY NEW ORDER—Adolf Hitler—Reynal & Hitchcock ($1.89).

This is the greatest mass of rabble-rousing ever compiled—some 100 of Hitler’s speeches in one volume—and, in the words of New York Times Critic Charles G. Poore,”the greatest anthology of broken promises.” Editor: Franco-American Newspaperman Raoul de Roussy de Sales. Its 987 pages cover the Hitler rhetorical record from an obscure speech in 1922 outlining the seven “most important fundamental principles” of Naziism, which was unnoticed even by the German press, to his proclamation of war against Russia, which was flashed to the whole world.

Editor de Sales has omitted many speeches, pared down others. “Only the most striking and clearest version of each of [Hitler’s] ideas” is presented.

Editor de Sales fears that this may bring cries of omission by Hitler lovers and haters, but he is more interested in showing how Hitler “used the microphone firstly to gain power in Germany and secondly to extend his domination over Europe.” So he arranges Hitler’s speeches in chronological order, divides the book into chapters corresponding to the successive political shocks which Europe has suffered in the last 20 years. A table of world events sets each speech in its proper historical context. They are enough to make a good democrat’s blood boil.

Raymond Gram Swing in his introduction calls My New Order “a sequel to Mein Kampf.” It is more. The unscrupulous greatness of Mein Kampf lies in two political perceptions: 1) the fact that whoever controls the masses controls the modern state; 2) the recipe for controlling the masses. Mein Kampf told how it could be done. My New Order shows Hitler doing it. For Hitler towers among history’s demagogues because he understands better than others that the timing between oratory and action must be like the interval between the flash and the crash of a gun.