blame hitler?

[Adrian II]

(..) read what the man said just 8 years before 1933 -"At the beginning of the [First World] War, or even during the War, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison-gas... ...then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain."

Caesar44, you are out of luck. I happen to have read the whole damn book in the original language.

In that passage Hitler was writing about the Social Democratic leadership, the 'Marxist leaders' mentioned in the previous sentence. He meant to say that if only 'these Jews' (who in his view led the nation to disaster and defeat in 1918) had shared the fate of the ordinary German worker in the trenches, they would not have been able to perform their betrayal behind the lines (the infamous 'Dolchstoss legend'). The passage does not call for the gassing of Jews, let alone of all the Jews.

Such issues have been addressed extentively in Hitler-scholarship, particularly in Werner Maser's commented version of the book titled Hitler's Mein Kampf.

The earliest recorded word of Hitler with regard to the 'Jewish question' was in a letter which he wrote when a corporal and Vertrauensmann in the German Army in 1919. In it, he wrote that there was an essential difference between 'sentimental antisemitism' and 'rational antisemitism'. The first was content to merely attack individual Jews in pogroms. The latter (his preferred version) would see to the removal ('Entfernung') of all Jews from society. Not destruction, removal.

The remarkable fact about Mein Kampf is that it lays out a lot of plans that later materialised (totalitarian rule, foreign conquest, etcetera) but not the mass murder of the Jews. That whole issue is conspicuously absent from the book. And the fact of the matter is that Mein Kampf was not taken very seriously by anyone at the time.

Of course you may refer to Hillgruber, who was an extreme intentionalist writing before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but if you want to paint a credible picture you will have to address more recent findings such as those brought up by Kershaw, as I mentioned, in particular the fact that Hitler himself had to be convinced of instituting various 'Stufen' of the Holocaust. Even at the start of the war, the nazi leadership harboured plans for a forced emigration of all Jews from German and occupied territory, for a mass 'sale'' of Jews to foreign countries, or for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Poland or Madagascar.

Haffner maintains that the decision to destroy Jewry was a consequence of the lost battles in Russia, which made Hitler realise that he would lose the war. The murder of the Jews, on the other hand, was at least something he could accomplish... It became a substitute victory for Hitler, as it were, which seems to be in line with what most biographers state about his character. I suppose we will never really know what went on inside his head.