#21
Post
by michael mills » 15 Dec 2015, 03:14
I said that parts of it were probably ghost-written, namely the chapters that present a theory of history based on struggle between races, because those chapters read almost like a textbook, being tightly argued and showing a logical development of ideas from a basic premiss. The logicality of those chapters suggests that they were drafted by an intellect more disciplined than Hitler's, whose genuine writings all read as if he were giving a speech, being very polemical in tone.
There are parts of the book that are in his normal polemical style, for example when he criticises those German nationalists who insist on hostility to Italy over the South Tyrol issue. As I wrote, it is most likely that the so-called "Second Book" was originally intended as political polemic against Hitler's rivals in the German right-wing nationalist movement, but then morphed into something more theoretical through the addition of the chapters referred to above.
Whatever the case, the whole project was abandoned, and the book was left uncompleted, simply trailing off without any conclusion. That could be because Hitler concluded that the book's main purpose of criticising hostility toward Italy could better achieved in other ways, such as a polemical pamphlet, and that a book expounding a theory of international relations simply was not needed. After all, Hitler never claimed to be an ideological theoretician, and often mocked those of his entourage such as Rosenberg who tried to be such; he always saw himself as primarily a propagandist, a "Trommler" and a man of action who achieved aims rather than formulating ideas.
As to evidence of the book's having been ghost-written in part, there is no external evidence in the sense of some intellectual or academically-trained person putting his hand up and admitting to having drafted the theoretical sections. However, there is good internal evidence in the form of the style and nature of those sections. Generally, when a person produces a work that differs from his usual style and appears to be above that person's known intellectual level, then the suspicion arises of that work's having been ghost-written or even plagiarised.
For the same reason Hitler's so-called "Political Testament", a collection of statements by Hitler allegedly taken down by Bormann in the early months of 1945, is suspected of being a post-war forgery by Francois Genoud, who first published that collection (in French!).
The upshot is that the so-called "Second Book" cannot be taken as a reliable guide to Hitler's foreign-policy aims, just as "Mein Kampf" cannot be taken as such a guide.