In Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, he outlines his militaristic, racist and anti-democratic world view and future plans for Germany.
Although Hitler himself later distanced himself from the book, referring to it as “fantasies [written] behind bars”, this was obviously not what he thought while he was in prison in 1923-1925.
The initial sales of Hitler’s first book were not good and his party, the NSDAP, performed poorly at the 1928 elections. Hitler believed this was due to the public’s poor understanding of his ideas and thus decided to write a sequel to Mein Kampf, to expand on its ideas, primarily focusing on matters of foreign policy. However, only two copies of the manuscript were produced and one was made public. It was neither edited nor published in Nazi Germany, and is thus known simply as the Zweites Buch (Second Book).
In 1935, Hitler ordered it to be put in a safe in an air raid shelter, where it remained until the end of World War II, when it was discovered by an American officer. Its whereabouts remained unknown until 1958, when a historian located it while screening captured Nazi documents in Alexandria, Virginia. It was first published in Munich in 1961. The first authoritative English edition was published in 2003, although an illegal translation had been published in New York in 1962.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the two books is that the Zweites Buch presents the USA as a much more credible threat to Nazi Germany in the long run, in contrast to Mein Kampf, which largely dismissed them as corrupt and racially degenerate.
Among other things, Hitler claimed that, around 1980, there would be a final struggle for global domination between Germany and the British Empire on one side and the USA on the other.
