Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, was Hitler 's autobiography written while incarcerated for the National Socialist German Workers ' Party putsch of 1923 where it was the party 's intention of taking over the whole of Germany. The revolt was unsuccessful and left many involved in jail. The excerpt of the book, located in The Jew in the Modern World, concerns the development of Hitler 's anti-Semitic views as well as his final conclusions concerning the fate of Jews. This early literature of the Nazis shows to the reader the way in which Jews would be dehumanized enough to no longer consider them Germans, then European, then hardly human. The beginning of the excerpt, Hitler admits to his feeling that he considered Jews to be Germans due to the "course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look." By referring to a "human look", Hitler is dehumanizing the Jewish German in the eyes of his readers. This becomes the very important step towards ostracizing, separating, and eventually killing a whole group, " I could no longer very well doubt that the object of my study were not Germans of a different religion, but a people in themselves." It was not until Hitler was to visit Vienna that he saw a large number of Jews in their traditional garb as well as beard. This encounter left him, as he describes it in his biography, with a struggle between "sentiment and reason" concerning Jews. By explaining his similar emotions, Hitler was guiding other from listening to their natural sentiments and to follow his lead into "reason". Reason meant to commit acts that go against their cultural, religious, and human nature.
Once he has expressed his feelings towards the Jews, he develops why Jews should not be treated as equals; or as he calls it, the "moral stains on this "chosen people". He accuses the Jew of frivolous accusations of being everything from smelly and unkempt to proponents of prostitution and "white slave

Cited: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford university Press, 1995. 637-639.