Mein Kampf

Edited from hundreds of news-reel and feature films photographed over a period of some thirty-five years, Mein Kampf is, in brief, an historical survey of the rise of German National Socialism. A Swedish production, it lacks nothing in fluidity of event and incident, or in sense of commentary: it is both factual and realistic—a documentary record of a period of history which has been so unsuccessfully dramatised in films the ilk of Operation Eichmann (U.S. A.), and Unternehmen Teutonic-schwert (East Germany). As such —an unbiassed account—it has achieved its purpose; and only at the expense of uncompromising truth. But truth, as everyone well knows and as Mein Kampf makes well apparent, can often be more horrifying and unbelievable than the wildest fantasy.

From Hindenburg and Ludendorff poring over war maps to the Nazi survivors at Nuremburg protesting their innocence, the film examines history: soldiers marching happily to war in 1914, to the sound of a German band; political parties warring in the streets of Berlin, in the 20's; the elections of 1933; the Nazi rallies; Chamberlain and Munich; the Second War.

But the emphasis is upon Hitler —whose life is shown in great detail in the movie—and his party. We see Hitler as a young man; a War (I) hero decorated with the Iron Cross; a prisoner in Lands-berg where Mein Kampf was written (1924); a frenzied orator in the Reichstag; as Fuehrer and ultimately, carpet-chewing paranoic (though the film does not actually show this symptomatic incident) We see Hitler and Goering, Himmler and Goebbels, formulating their policies of Weltanschaung oder Niedergang, Lebensraum, Herrenrasse, etc.,—the means to the material ends—Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Gestapo and S.D.

All this we see in operation, examined in the cold, rational light of a thousand candid cameras. Evaluation is left to the viewer. Here, it is not so much what we like to believe, rather, it is a matter of realising the incidents as true and accepting them as such. Who could portend in 1935, the state of Europe five years later? We see a group of students burning books: Mann, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Duerer and Heine. Goethe once said (the commentator says) where books burn, men burn. We see one million persons at Nuremburg rally hailing their Fuehrer We see the notorious Volksgericht in action on the men who tried to assassinate Hitler (July 20, 1944). And as the commentator says: all this happened; it must never happen again.

On the plane of documentary representation, I find Mein Kampf an eminently satisfactory account of Nazism and Fascist Germany; there is no pretence at formulating a German national stereotype—a favourite amongst films of this genre (Hitler was one of us, the script says), and there is little that is sociologically useless. If we must have rejoinders on this subject—and it appears we must —then let them be as cruel and forceful as this. A remarkable compilation all in all, evoking the pathology of a nation during twenty of man's darkest years.

—M.J.W.