CHAPTER I
AT HOME
FODAY I consider it my good fortune that Fate de-
1 signated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth.
For this small town is situated on the border between
those two German States, the reunion of which seems, at
least to us of the younger generation, a task to be furthered
with every means our lives long.
German-Austria must return to the great German mo-
therland, and not because of economic considerations of
any sort. No, no: even if from the economic point of view
this union were unimportant, indeed, if it were harmful, it
ought nevertheless to be brought about. Common blood be-
longs in a common Reich. As long as the German nation is
unable even to band together its own children in one com-
mon State, it has no moral right to think of colonization as
one of its political aims. Only when the boundaries of the
Reich include even the last German, only when it is no
longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them,
does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral
right to acquire foreign soil and territory. The sword is
then the plow, and from the tears of war there grows the
daily bread for generations to come. Therefore, this little
town on the border appears to me the symbol of a great
task. But in another respect also it looms up as a warning
4 MEIN KAMPF
to our present time. More than a hundred years ago, this
insignificant little place had the privilege of gaining an
immortal place in German history at least by being the
scene of a tragic misfortune that moved the entire nation.
There, during the time of the deepest humiliation of our
fatherland, Johannes Palm, citizen of Nurnberg, a middle-
class bookdealer, die-hard 'nationalist, 1 an enemy of the
The idealism of the Wars of Liberation, waged by Prussia
against Napoleon, is reflected in the career of Johann Phillip
Palm, Nurnberg book-seller, who in 1806 issued a work en-
titled, Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung (Germany in
the Hour of Its Deepest Humiliation). This was a diatribe
against the Corsican. Palm was tried by a military tribunal,
sentenced to death, and shot at Braunau on August 26, 1806.
During the centenary year (1906) a play in honor of Palm was
written by A. Ebenhoch, an Austrian author. It is possible
that Hitler may have seen or read this drama.
Leo Schlageter, a German artillery officer who served after
the World War in the Free Corps with which General von der
Goltz attempted to conserve part of what Germany had gained
by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was found guilty of sabotage
by a French military tribunal during the Ruhr invasion of
1923. He had blown up a portion of the railway line between
Dusseldorf and Duisburg, and had been caught in the act.
The assertion that he was 'betrayed* to the French is without
historical foundation. It was the policy of the German govern-
ment to discountenance open military measures and to place
its reliance upon so-called 'passive resistance.' Karl Severing,
then Social Democratic Minister of the Interior in Prussia, was
a zealous though cautious patriot whose firm defense of the
democratic institutions of Weimar angered extremists of all
kinds. He was thus a favorite Nazi target. The governments oi
the Reich and of Prussia made every effort to save Schlageter.
The Vatican intervened in his behalf, and it is generally sup-
posed that the French authorities would have commuted the
sentence had it not been for a sudden wave of opposition to