Religion. Discuss ( or should that be argue )

Excellent stuff here.

To pick up on Tynan bringing Mein Kampf into the discussion, I’d humbly say that it can teach lots of things, prominent amongst them being how not to write. Adolf could not write, bless him. The translator’s introduction to the volume of it that I have makes this clear several times before you get stuck into the book proper. Despite the effort of freely translating several hundred pages of humiliating wind, the translator seems not to have enjoyed the process one bit, and to begrudge the literary Hitler entirely. Hitler repeats himself page after page. Is he not another of the historical speed-freaks, the ones which Lou Reed claimed in the sleeve-notes to Metal Machine Music were responsible for all wars? Adolf sure wrote like one. I couldn’t even finish Mein Kampf. To write a pile of boring bilge which by rights should explain the beginnings of one of the most fascinating ‘events’ (if that’s the right word) in all of history is quite a feat.

No, it is entirely consistent with the well-known problems with the Nazi regime. I haven't read it, but those people I know who have read it (who include at least one history student, who bought the book, which you can't buy in Germany, when he visited me here) found the most chilling passages chilling enough not to be bored by repetition or other aspects of low style in other passages.

Had Goebbels, had he already been in the picture then, written this book, it would without a doubt have caused a huge outcry. As it was, it remained relatively unread as the ramblings of an uneducated fantasist. However, I don't believe that it was quite as unread as a lot of people claimed.

No wonder no one read it when it first came out.

It's true that few people read it when it first came out. However, as the NSDAP gathered traction, a new edition was published, which rapidly sold a lot of copies--1.5m in 1933 after Hitler seized power according to this source:

http://www.zukunft-braucht-erinnerung.de/drittes-reich/ns-ideologie-und-weltanschauung/421-hitlers-mein-kampf.html

I can't imagine that it 'wasn't read' during this time. I think it's certain that a lot of people would have read at least part of it, and that the most notorious passages would have attracted enough attention to have been shared among people--in those days, of course, people shared books a lot.

I do think it's true that it was read less again after this surge, although with an estimated 10m copies in circulation by the end of the war, you'd think that more people must have read it than later admitted it--this was the new Imperial Chancellor's book.

The question of who knew what is a very thorny question in German history and needs careful differentiation.