The publisher Hurst & Blackett brought out an English language edition of AH's book, Mein Kampf, in 1939. It was, as George Orwell says in the review to which I'll link you in a moment, edited in an appeasementist spirit: 'see? Hitler's not so bad, maybe we can all get along.' A year later, the same publishers re-issued it, apparently with new prefatory material etc. because Britain and Germany had in the meantime gone to war. I think Orwell's review, written in response to the re-issuance, holds up very well through all the intervening decades. I especially like the summary of the world Hitler wanted: " a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder." Here's the URL: https://worldview.carnegiecouncil.org/archive/worldview/1975/07/2555.html/_res/id=File1/v18_i007-008_a010.pdf
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Last week I quoted from a 1975 book by Adam Fergusson, WHEN MONEY DIES, about the Weimar era hyperinflation. One point the book makes that was new to me was that the Germans weren't the only ones hit. All three of the defeated powers (I say 3 because of course after the war Austria and Hungary were separate countries, no longer connected by Emperor or hyphen) were subjected to the ruinous war reparations demands of the victorious allies, and all three countries gave in to the temptation to gun up the printing presses. As to the consequences, I found this passage of great interest: Only the country people were surviving in Germany [in autumn 1922] in any comfort: anyone who lived off the land had the readiest access to real values. It was not surprising that even when they ensured that the money receipts for their goods were no more than equivalent in purchasing power than what they were used to, they were accused of extortion-- the more so if they del...
When Money Dies , by Adam Fergusson, is a well-known study of the hyperinflation of the early Weimar Republic years. Here is a passage, referring to the demands of the labor unions in late 1921 and early 1922: "It was significant enough that union demands were still for higher wages to meet rising prices rather than, before all else, stable prices and a stable currency. A few of the financially sophisticated could be heard blaming the government, and the Finance Minister in particular, but a typical view was that price went up because the foreign exchange went up, that the exchange rate went up because of speculation on the Stock Exchange, and that this was obviously the fault of the Jews. Although the price of the dollar was a matter for almost universal discussion, it still appeared to most Germans that the dollar was going up, not that the mark was falling: that the price of food and clothing was being forcibly increased daily, not that the value of money ...
It is a truism that "hyperflation in Germany paved the way for Hitler's takeover." Everybody knows this ... right? Everybody has seen the photos of the wheelbarrows -- filling one wheelbarrow with marks was enough to get the bearer of the barrow a loaf of bread. Like much that everybody knows, this isn't quite ... accurate. There is some truth to it, but ... The worst of the hyperinflation in Weimar Germany was over long before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. It was in the early 20s that those famous wheelbarrows were rolling about with those bills. Late in '23, after a new currency was introduced [one Rentenmark, as above, was pegged to each one TRILLION of the cheapened Reichsmarks ] the govt wisely pegged the new Rentenmarks to the US dollar at a ratio of 4.2:1. A peg to the U.S. dollar was, indirectly, a peg to gold. Then the currency situation gradually normalized. This is worth noting because there was no very direct relationship between th...
Erich Ludendorff was an important German military figure throughout the first world war. He was a major general when it began, and was immediately made Deputy Chief of Staff to the German Second Army under General Karl von Bulow. In August 1916 he was promoted to Quartermaster General. I'm boring you with this because I've found a nice brief description of Ludendorff's pre-war life in Max Hastings' new book, CATASTROPHE 1914. "A man of chilly rationality though highly nervous temperament, in 1904 he indulged the sole romantic gesture of his life by falling in love with a married mother of four children, Frau Margarethe Pernet. They met in the street in a rainstorm, when he gallantly offered her the shelter of his umbrella. She divorced her husband, married Ludendorff, and the two achieved a notably successful partnership."