Mein Kampf, political manifesto written by Adolf Hitler. It was his only complete book, and the work became the bible of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany’s Third Reich. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, and an abridged edition appeared in 1930. By 1939 it had sold 5,200,000 copies and had been translated into 11 languages.

The first volume, entitled Die Abrechnung (“The Settlement [of Accounts],” or “Revenge”), was written in 1924 in the Bavarian fortress of Landsberg am Lech, where Hitler was imprisoned after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It treats the world of Hitler’s youth, the First World War, and the “betrayal” of Germany’s collapse in 1918; it also expresses Hitler’s racist ideology, identifying the Aryan as the “genius” race and the Jew as the “parasite,” and declares the need for Germans to seek living space (Lebensraum) in the East at the expense of the Slavs and the hated Marxists of Russia. It also calls for revenge against France.

According to Hitler, it was “the sacred mission of the German people…to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements…and raise them to the dominant position.” “All who are not of a good race are chaff,” wrote Hitler. It was necessary for Germans to “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses, and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.” Hitler ascribed international significance to the elimination of Jews, which “must necessarily be a bloody process,” he wrote.