The Great Dictator

Though Hitler seemed to cover his subjects thoroughly in Mein Kampf, it appeared last week that he wrote a second book. Hitlers Zweites Buck (Hitler's Second Book) was dictated to a sloppy typist in 1928, but never published. At the time, the Nazi Party and publishing house were ailing, and as the years went by, Hitler's second thoughts made publication of the second book seem inadvisable.

In May 1945 a U.S. Signal Corps captain assigned to collecting Nazi documents received a manuscript alleged to be a copy of this unpublished work. Transferred with a mountain of other captured documents to Washington archives under the number EAP 105/40, the manuscript was all but forgotten. Scholarly sleuths from Munich's Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History--TIME, Dec. 7, 1959) finally tracked it down, discovered that the University of Michigan's Professor Gerhard L. Weinberg had beaten them to it.

Fearing outcries if Hitler's heresies were published under American auspices, the State Department decided to allow the German institute to publish the book. Last week an edition of 5,000--in the highly original German--went on sale in West Germany (the profits go to victims of Naziism).

The book will do little for Hitler's reputation. Opinionated, impassioned, implausible and slanderous, the text makes points as only Hitler could make them. When all was said and the typing done, there was little new in it all, proving that even dictators are not immune to secondbook jinxes. Sample excerpts:

P:"Whoever will not be the hammer will in history be the anvil . . . The sword was always the precursor of the plow, and if one speaks at all of human rights, then war deserves in this single case the highest right . . . Every healthy folk sees in the acquisition of territory nothing sinful but something natural."

P: "A world empire of the size of ancient Rome's or of Britain's today is always the result of a marriage of highest folk values and clearest political goals."

P:In the United States, Hitler saw a threat to Europe. Reflecting on the loss of Europe's "boldest and best" racial elements through emigration, Hitler saw the U.S. as "a new folk community of racially highest value." In fact, opined Hitler, America was a racist state: "That the American union feels itself to be a Nordic Germanic state and by no means an international stew of peoples is evidenced by the manner of allotment of immigration quotas to Europeans--first Scandinavians, then English and finally Germans have the largest quotas."

Sometimes the author seemed to be admonishing the future dictator:

P:"That is really a sight to see when such a bourgeois patriot begins to become incandescent and one knows it is all merely playacting. Pretending nationalist passions is as appropriate to our passionless lazy burghers as an old whore miming love."

P:"It gives one cold shivers to think that persons who never intend to risk their own skin and blood deliberately cause a development that in the end must lead to a bloody conflict."

Observed Germany's Professor Hans Rothfels: "May this publication contribute to that catharsis which after the catastrophe of the Third Reich is a requirement of our national self-respect."

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