Reasons why Hitler's Second Book is BS?

[Whodunnit?]

So there's a discussion about "Lebensraum".
I recently listened to a lecture by some "historian" on YT, where he argues that Mein Kampf is proof enough that Hitler always wanted to do fight a genocidal war against the USSR, so that invasion was not a preemptive war. And he argued that all claims that he did not have the same mindset in 1941 as in 1923, because he never wrote a second book.
Again you can add context here and argue that Mein Kampf was written while he was a rebel rouser in some bavarian jail and a book was the best way to increase his outreach, while later he explained his views in more than enough speeches and interviews.

But there is an unreleased second book, allegedly written in 1928. Now I don't have enough of the history of it, but let's say my street wisdom tells me that it another piece of fake paper evidence. So allegedly never publshed, but "found" and released in 1962. Why so late?

And here is the story on Wikipedia, and again, if you believe that, never go buy a used car on your own.

"Gerhard Weinberg speculates that the Zweites Buch was not published in 1928 because Mein Kampf did not sell well at that time and Hitler's publisher, Franz-Eher-Verlag, would have told Hitler that a second book would hinder sales even more"

As a Harry Potter-hater, I wish somebody would have said that to JK Rowling. Come on, this is the dumbest excuse I have heard yet. Literally nobody would write a second book it that would make sense. There would still only be one Star Wars-movie if that would make any sense.
But they expect you to be even dumber:

"Zweites Buch was written after the Nazi party’s poor showing in the 1928 German elections, which Hitler believed was caused by the public’s misunderstanding of his ideas."
[...]
As in Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined [...] his Stufenplan. Briefly, the Stufenplan called for three stages. In the first stage, there would be a massive military build-up, the overthrow of the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles, and the forming of alliances with Fascist Italy and the British Empire. The second stage would be a series of fast, "lightning wars" in conjunction with Italy and the United Kingdom against France and whichever of her allies in Eastern Europe—such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia—chose to stand by her. The third stage would be a war to obliterate what Hitler considered to be the "Judeo-Bolshevik" regime in the Soviet Union."

So Hitler wanted to write a second book to win more votes, and he thought promising endless world war would do the trick.

Ok, the rest is just the typical world conquest-nonsense.

So what can you tell me about the history of this book?

[hermod]

So there's a discussion about "Lebensraum".
I recently listened to a lecture by some "historian" on YT, where he argues that Mein Kampf is proof enough that Hitler always wanted to do fight a genocidal war against the USSR, so that invasion was not a preemptive war.

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf only a few months after the end of Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, that is, when almost nobody would have bet a Kopek on the long-term survival of the newly-established Bolshevik empire. When he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler believed that (i.e. in the quick collapse of the new Soviet Empire) too and he believed that the surrounding countries & empires would easily (i.e. almost without a shotgun) lay hold of big pieces of that short-lived empire. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made crystal clear that the German annexation of some lands in Eastern Europe would take place only after the downfall and dismemberment of the Bolshevik empire. Hitler's Mein Kampf passage on Lebensraum in the east was not about a bloody war on a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. It was about the seizure of lands without an imperial master, like the occupancy of a heirless property.

In 1940 and 1941, Hitler [and everybody else] had of course realized that the Soviet empire wouldn't soon collapse as first thought and that it was even stronger than ever. As the head of the Third Reich, Hitler led his people in accordance with realpolitik, not in accordance with an old patently-erroneous prediction that the new Bolshevik empire would quickly fall apart on its own because it was led by Jews and "Jewry itself is not an organizing element, but a ferment of decomposition."

https://postimg.cc/6y06RDXL

[borjastick]

Hitler probably knew that MK was a masterpiece and his tour de force etc.

Why do some sportspeople retire immediately after winning a world title and others go on for many more titles? Nico Rosberg retired literally minutes after his one F1 title and Hamilton got 7 and keeps going. There are many examples of this. The reason is winning one world championship is enough, all they ever wanted and once achieved that's it, game over.

For Hitler that may well have been the case. He was on a mission with MK to say something profound and worthwhile. He achieved just that so maybe anything after would be second rate.

[hermod]

Hitler probably knew that MK was a masterpiece and his tour de force etc.

Why do some sportspeople retire immediately after winning a world title and others go on for many more titles? Nico Rosberg retired literally minutes after his one F1 title and Hamilton got 7 and keeps going. There are many examples of this. The reason is winning one world championship is enough, all they ever wanted and once achieved that's it, game over.

For Hitler that may well have been the case. He was on a mission with MK to say something profound and worthwhile. He achieved just that so maybe anything after would be second rate.

I disagree on that. With Hitler retiring in 1925, Mein Kampf would now be just another of the numerous complety-forgotten political books written in past centuries.

[Whodunnit?]

I somehow completely messed up that posting.
So what I wanted to say: the historian said that Hitler never changed his mind on any of his statements in Mein Kampf, because he never wrote a second book. IMO this is typical for these propagandists that call themselves historians: they always try to take advantage of the ignorance of their audience. So what about his speeches? What about the interviews?

Again, from Oil & War:

From the depths of World War I had come the dogma that only through self-sufficiency could Germany prosper in peace or battle. The 1938 rally was above all a celebration of that economic independence. When Hitler issued a proclamation at the rally that the fixed goal of autarky, or economic self-sufficiency, had been achieved, it was the fulfillment of a national dream. The humiliation of surrender in 1918, caused not by defeat on the battlefield but because Germany had neither fuel nor food to continue, was ingrained in the minds of all Germans, whatever their political leanings.

Now, five years after taking power, Hitler proclaimed that he had brought Germany to a point of economic self-sufficiency. He declared:

[The] German economy is being so constructed that at any time it can be completely independent from other countries and stand on its own
feet. And this is succeeding. The idea of blockading Germany can even now be buried as an entirely ineffective weapon. The National
Socialist State, with energy that is peculiar to it, has drawn conclusions from the lessons of the World War. And now, as before, we hold
to the fundamental principle that we would rather limit ourselves in this or that field should it become necessary in order to make ourselves
independent from foreign countries. Above all, the following decision always will stand at the top of our economic actions: security
of the nation goes ahead of everything else. Its economic existence is, therefore, to be secured materially in its fullest measure with our own standard of life and our own living space. For only then can the German army be in a position at all times to take the freedom and interests
of the Reich under its strong protection.

The task of self-sufficiency had been given to Hermann Göring, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. In addition to commanding the Luftwaffe, Göring became Germany’s master economic planner to implement the ambitious Four Year Plan of self-sufficiency, which began in 1936. In only half the allotted time, Göring could boast at Nürnberg that the plan was already a fact of military, political, and economic reality:

we shall never be forced to sacrifice our honor. Never will it be possible to starve our nation and then demoralize it by propaganda. Those
times are definitely over. We are provisioned both with food and with raw materials . . . we are well supplied and excellently armed. We
have a powerful army and a great navy and our air force is the world’s most modern, most technically advanced and most numerous.

Of course, this isn't his definitive statement. His definitive statement is his testament. And I mean his real one, not something that somebody found in a drawer 20 years later.
There he writes: "It is not true that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in the year 1939. It was desired and provoked entirely by those international statesmen who are either of Jewish origin or work for Jewish interest"

So there you go. There is no "It still is my deep conviction that me must drive the slavic subhuman into asia".

Anyhow, what I wanted to ask:

What is the background of this book? Did somebody in 1962 just open up a dusty drawer again and woops, there it was? Like so "documents"? Are there people here who believe this is genuine?

I don't believe this "We found new discoveries in Russian archives"-nonsense, we are talking about the biggest war in history that took place 80 years ago, and was followed by the biggest court cases in history. We are not talking about Göbekli Tepe or Atlantis. There is zero new evidence about the Vietnam war, but they act like WW2 is one big mystery and there are still documents somewhere that nobody ever read. I assume they already went over everything. Hitler's second book would have been found before 1962. I am so sick of these stories. "As many fingers as I say"

[DissentingOpinions]

Hitler was never anti-Russian - he was anti-communist. If you were an ethnic Russian, you were considered a white person with a place in Europe. Jews and Asian Russians were to be sent to the Russian Far-East. Anybody who says that there was a plan to annex countries other than Austria as part of a German supremacy program is lying. The man himself stated in the beginning of Mein Kampf that he only wanted the unification of Austria & Germany. The language used during the war was meant to be more serious, because who wants to be seen as weak?

[curioussoul]

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf only a few months after the end of Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, that is, when almost nobody would have bet a Kopek on the long-term survival of the newly-established Bolshevik empire. When he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler believed that (i.e. in the quick collapse of the new Soviet Empire) too and he believed that the surrounding countries & empires would easily (i.e. almost without a shotgun) lay hold of big pieces of that short-lived empire. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made crystal clear that the German annexation of some lands in Eastern Europe would take place only after the downfall and dismemberment of the Bolshevik empire. Hitler's Mein Kampf passage on Lebensraum in the east was not about a bloody war on a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. It was about the seizure of lands without an imperial master, like the occupancy of a heirless property.

Yeah, good point. Germar wrote a lenghty foreword to Mattogno's book Mis-Chronicling Auschwitz, where he goes through much of the history leading up to Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union and the National Socialist landgrabs in Poland. Even so, many mainstream historians accept the invasion of the USSR as a preemptive war.

[Hektor]

Hitler probably knew that MK was a masterpiece and his tour de force etc.

Why do some sportspeople retire immediately after winning a world title and others go on for many more titles? Nico Rosberg retired literally minutes after his one F1 title and Hamilton got 7 and keeps going. There are many examples of this. The reason is winning one world championship is enough, all they ever wanted and once achieved that's it, game over.

For Hitler that may well have been the case. He was on a mission with MK to say something profound and worthwhile. He achieved just that so maybe anything after would be second rate.

I disagree on that. With Hitler retiring in 1925, Mein Kampf would now be just another of the numerous complety-forgotten political books written in past centuries.

Possible and plausibly so.

If Hitler retired in 1925, they'd have to find another scape goat and boogey men.
But for the post-ww2 world order... A Hitler2.0. was needed. They can't do without that. The Ideologies won't work then. They couldn't legitimize policy as they do now. So the Hitler-Holocaust believe is a religious foundation for post-WW2 political and cultural thought.

[Hieldner]

But there is an unreleased second book, allegedly written in 1928. Now I don't have enough of the history of it, but let's say my street wisdom tells me that it another piece of fake paper evidence. So allegedly never publshed, but "found" and released in 1962. Why so late?

It is not unreleased, but was only published “posthumously” in German in 1961, just in time for the second wave of Holocaust publications after the immediate post-war period, accompanying the Jerusalem Eichmann trial and setting the stage for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. The introduction by Gerhard Weinberg tries to find explanations why it wasn’t published earlier:

V. Why was the manuscript not published?

The existence of the document naturally raises the question of why it was not published by Eher-Verlag. It is clear from the text itself that a book, not a secret transcript, was intended. It is also clear that no editing, revision or correction took place after the dictation, as had happened with the volumes of Mein Kampf. The manuscript was thus set aside in its first version and was not prepared for printing either immediately or later. There is no certain evidence as to why the book never appeared. However, some obvious points of view can be put forward as possible reasons.

It is quite possible that Amann, in the situation of summer 1928, advised against publication, at least for the time being. As director of the Eher publishing house, he knew that Mein Kampf was very difficult to sell that year in particular; it was the worst year since the publication of the first volume—only 3015 copies are recorded in the royalty book [1]. A new book by Hitler would have immediately competed with Mein Kampf. The party had to cancel the annual Party Congress at this time anyway for urgent reasons: could one expect or demand that the party’s own publishing house should bring out a book that would have made it almost impossible to sell the second volume of Mein Kampf, which was only slowly being distributed? Max Amann was always later praised by his wartime comrade Hitler as being particularly enterprising [2]; perhaps he, knowing the contents of both the old and the new book, talked Hitler out of the idea of publishing it, at least at that time.

Another reason for the non-publication may have been that major revisions would have been unavoidable after only a short time in the manuscript. From the summer of 1929 onwards, the NSDAP was in a struggle against the Young Plan (not mentioned in the manuscript, of course). Stresemann, who appears in the manuscript as the main opponent, died in October 1929, after which events came to a head in the final political and economic crisis of the Weimar Republic. Under these circumstances, Hitler had difficulty finding time for the necessary revision of the manuscript. Other considerations may also have contributed to making publication seem inopportune. In 1928 Alfred Hugenberg had become leader of the German National People’s Party. An enemy of the Republic as fierce as he was limited, he associated himself with Hitler the following year and financed the rise of the NSDAP in the “People’s Rally against the Young Plan”. At this time, the manuscript’s outpourings about bourgeois politicians were hardly in place. In this context it is interesting to point out that at that time—and probably for similar reasons—one of the few factual changes in the text of Mein Kampf was made by deleting an outburst against the German philistines [3].

The above conjectures, which result from a careful examination of the circumstances of the time, at least offer some points of view for answering the question as to why the manuscript was not published, without, however, being able to solve it completely.

Footnotes:
[1] The royalty book of the Eher publishing house is in the Manuscripts Department of the Library of Congress in Washington. See also the cited article by Oron J. Hale.
[2] See the Table Talks, Trevor Roper edition, pp. 329-331, 346 f., 464 f., 479; Knight edition, pp. 280 f.; see also Walter Petwaidic, The Authoritarian Anarchy (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1946), p. 45.
[3] See the careful work of Hermann Hammer, “Die deutschen Ausgaben von Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’”, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, IV (1956), pp. 161–178, especially p. 175. – In the text of the 1st edition of the 2nd volume, and also in the offprint of Chapter XIII on the Tyrolean question already discussed, this is introduced as follows: “Yes, South Tyrol. Who among our philistines does not immediately feel the flame of bright indignation burning from his witty face! If I am dealing with this question here at this very point...” In the editions from 1930 onwards, the sentence “Who among our philistines... face!” is missing. The English edition (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939) follows the old text (X. 911). [...]

Hitlers Zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928. Introduced and commented by Gerhard L. Weinberg. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961, pp. 36–7.

:lol: So Hitler wanted to write a second book to win more votes, and he thought promising endless world war would do the trick.

Exactly. While the references to new living space in the East in Mein Kampf are vague, the author of this book becomes very concrete as he talks about the First World War and suggests to roughly double the territory of the Reich:

500,000 square kilometres more land in Europe [1] can provide new homes for millions of German peasants, but can also provide the German people with millions of soldiers for the event of a decision. The only area in Europe that came into question for such a land policy was Russia. The sparsely populated western peripheral areas bordering on Germany, which had already received German colonisers as cultural carriers, also came into question for the new European land policy of the German nation (p. 102).

Footnotes:
[1] In order to have a basis of comparison for Hitler's statements, the following territorial dimensions are of interest (as of 1928):
France: 551,000 sq km; Poland: 388,000 sq km; Italy: 310,000 sq km; Yugoslavia: 249,000 sq km; Czechoslovakia: 140,000 sq km; Austria: 84,000 sq km. Germany had lost about 70,000 square kilometres (in Europe) at the end of the First World War. It is therefore quite understandable when Hitler rejected the 1914 borders as a goal.
[2] By “sparsely populated” areas, Hitler probably meant areas that seemed advantageous to him for settlement purposes and that would be considered sparsely populated after the “resettlement of most of the inhabitants”. As is well known, the good farming areas of Eastern Europe were already rather overpopulated before the First World War.

The only war aim worthy of this immense bloodshed could only have been to assure the German soldier that so and so many 100,000 square kilometres of land would be allocated to the front-line fighters as property or made available for general colonisation by Germans (p. 105).

Ibid.

So what can you tell me about the history of this book?

The lengthy preface and introduction of the German edition go into some detail on the provenance of the document, as opposed to the English edition I have looked at. I think this is still the main source on this topic and I will summarise some of it.

In his preface, Hans Rothfels, then director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, writes that his institute was first informed of a “second book” in 1951 by a letter from the author Erich Lauer. Hermann Mau, director of the predecessor of the IfZ, who died in a car accident in 1952, did not find it in the same year during research in the U.S. He listed it in the overview of German archival and library holdings transferred to the U.S. submitted to the Historical Division of the State Department on 12 June 1951 as “allegedly existing manuscript from 1935”. Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a lecture given in Munich in November 1959, still spoke of a book that no longer exists, which he dated to 1924. (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1960, vol. 8, no. 2, p. 133.) But already before, Josef Berg, who had held a senior position at the publishing house, had in a letter to the Institute in 1958 “made the claim, which in any case is highly probable and justified”, that Hitler had dictated the top-secret manuscript directly on to the typewriter of Max Amann, then head of the publishing house. Rothfels went to Washington 1958 for archival studies to find this document and therefore turned to Gerhard L. Weinberg, who had been his student in Chicago. He mentions the study Guide to Captured German Documents Weinberg had written for the U.S. Air Force in 1952, unclassified in 2008. The preface states:

The War Documentation Project (WDP) is being conducted under Air Force contract by the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. It is a major research activity of the Psychological Warfare Directorate of this Institute. Mr. Hans J. Epstein serves as Project Officer.

Gerhard L. Weinberg. Guide to Captured German Documents. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University, Human Resources Research Institute, 1952, p. iii. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0074148.

Then Rothfels writes:

It was very fortunate that Dr. Weinberg had already pursued the unknown manuscript, which was thought to be lost, on his own initiative. He succeeded in finding it and gaining access to it. The identity of the manuscript was initially established from the seizure protocol enclosed with it and printed in the appendix. In addition to this external proof of origin, Dr. Weinberg followed up with the greatest care all indications of a direct or indirect nature that were essential for the examination of authenticity, the history of origin and dating. In all these respects, he has arrived at completely conclusive and philologically sound results, and he has also supervised the edition itself with impeccable textual criticism. Therefore, as far as the assured authorship and the scholarly character of the edition are concerned, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte had no reservations about including it in the series of “Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte” published by him.

Hitlers Zweites Buch, p. 8.

But this “seizure protocol” doesn’t exist, as Weinberg himself mentions in the Appendix (p. 225, footnote 2)! There’s only an undated slip of paper called “supplementary report” by an U.S. captain of the signal corps named Paul M. Leake who had seized the document in May 1945, according to Weinberg’s story. It states the following:

Remarks:

1. This is a supplementary report. Joseph Berg, […] technical manager of this publishing house, gave us a manuscript of an alleged unpublished work by Adolf Hitler. It was written over 15 years ago and locked up in a safe. Mr. Berg had strictest orders that the manuscript could neither be printed or shown to anybody. […]

Ibid., p. 225.

Weinberg says in his introduction that he found the manuscript among publicly accessible documents in the National Archives under the signature EAP 105/40. It is a typewritten draft. According to a letter by Josef Berg to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte from 1958, Hitler dictated the text to Max Amann and a copy was kept at Obersalzberg. Since part of the manuscript is a carbon copy, Weinberg says that an error must have occurred while compiling the documents and that this proves the existence of at least one copy.

He points out that an unpublished book was mentioned in Hitler’s Table Talk on 17 February 1942 (midday), but only in the English edition by Trevor Roper (first published in 1953), which has already become suspect. He compares this edition with the quite different one by Gerhard Ritter from 1951, in which the remark is missing, also mentions it is missing in Picker’s and in a collection of documents he discovered himself, considers subsequent insertions by Heim or Bormann and concludes that the remark must be genuine.

In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach.

Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944. Introduced by Hugh Trevor-Roper. New York City: Enigma Books, 2000, p. 314.

So Hitler apparently remembered in his conversation with Himmler exactly what he had written in which manuscript, and while he was talking put brackets around his mention of the unpublished work.

Weinberg also mentions that another book, Hitler privat: Erlebnisbericht einer Geheimsekretärin, contains such a remark on page 155 f. It is based on a collection of testimonies and interviews of Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s secretaries, and was published by Albert Zoller in 1949:

As early as 1925, Hitler had secretly started writing a book on foreign policy. No one ever got to see the stack of sheets he had covered with his small, almost illegible handwriting. Very seldom and only in moments of agonising worry did he speak of the work he had begun. In 1939, shortly after the English declaration of war, he said to Hess in my presence out of a fit of megalomania: “My whole work is now falling apart. My book was written for nothing.”

Hitlers Zweites Buch, pp. 18–9.

Weinberg concludes that, since she obviously got to see the stack of sheets, it wasn’t hidden away as she said. He regards the date as a failure of memory and says she must have talked about the manuscript of Mein Kampf, although obviously she talks about “the work he had begun”. Why Hitler didn’t mention the manuscript at other occasions is left unexplained.

In the next chapter Weinberg concludes just from the content of the manuscript that it must have been authored in 1928. Great. And in an interview in 2003 he stated this:

One day, leafing through the contents of a green box-file, he found a folder labelled “Draft of Mein Kampf”. Inside was a 324-page typescript: “The moment I looked at it, read the opening lines and the attached document on its confiscation, it became obvious to me that this was not a draft of Mein Kampf. In fact, this was the book to which I had seen references,” he says.
[…]
By a stroke of good fortune, it had already been declassified by the authorities, which meant there was nothing to stop Weinberg making it public.
[…]
The provenance of the typescript was good: it had been found among other documents known to be genuine.

Daniel Johnson. “Revealed: the amazing story behind Hitler’s second book.” The Telegraph, 25 September 2003. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3603289/Revealed-the-amazing-story-behind-Hitlers-second-book.html.

So this whole story is completely ridiculous just looking at the information in the book itself. But it is remarkable that some of these “historians” and publishers seem to include references to material yet to be manufactured in their works of fraud.

I don't believe this "We found new discoveries in Russian archives"-nonsense

Well, it is a fact that the Allies hide away important WWII documents in archives until this very day. Whether they release the original documents is up to their mood of the day.