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The troubling resurgence of his ideas andmanifesto, `Mein Kampf' BY KATIE ENGELHART

0 n April 30,1945, Adolf Hitler tookhis own life with a simultaneousbite into a cyanide pill and gunshotto the temple. The day before, hedictated his will from the dank con-fines of the Fuhrerbunker, a con-

crete shelter buried some eight metres belowthe old Reich Chancellery, as Soviet forcesencircled Berlin. What exactly happened nextis still fiercely contested, but by most accounts,

the bodies of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun,were carried upstairs to the garden by SSdevotees, doused in gasoline, and burned topieces-then buried, then later unearthed,

and then buried again in an unknown loca-tion, or perhaps just scattered to the wind.

Almost 65 years later to the day, the manand the totalitarian regime he establishedcontinue to fascinate us. In just the last fewyears, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler'spoorly written, 700-page magnum opus, "tur-gid, verbose, shapeless," to borrow from Win-ston Churchill, has earned bestseller statusin some unlikely markets: India, Turkey andthe Palestinian territories. His paintings arefetching record-setting prices, and trade inanything the Third Reich leader touched, ormight have touched, is thriving. In some

cases, the fascination is trivial, even absurd,such as the "Nazi chic" clothing that has beenpopular in Asia: T-shirts with Hitler portraitsand swastikas. In others, though, it is morepernicious: the 65 years that have passedsince Hitler's death have not dulled the allureof the Fiihrer, or his ideology, for the now-burgeoning extreme right.

Take the lead-up to last Sunday's nationalelections in Hungary, which saw the far-rightJobbik Magyarorszagert Mozgalom (Move-ment for a Better Hungary) rake in 16.7 percent of the national vote. In just a few years,Jobbik has grown from almost nothing, win-ning over a disenchanted electorate with itsstark anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric.Party officials have been careful to dismissany direct links to Nazism; anti-Semitism is

masked in attacks on Israeli investors andhatred of the Roma is justified with talk of

"gypsy crime." But members ofJobbik's para-military wing, the Magyar Garda (Hungar-ian Guard), have not been so cautious. Nei-ther have its supporters, who gathered by theDanube River last week to lash out at "Jew-ish pigs" and to unite in a common cry againstforeigners on Hungarian soil: "They shouldleave!" Jobbik's leaders, now at the helm ofthe opposition, are ready to take their coun-try forward-away from all that "commotionover the Holocaust."

HASNAIN KAZIM, a journalist of Pakistani andIndian origin who is based in Islamabad, shiesaway from revealing where he was born: Ger-many. But it's hard to avoid; Kazim says peoplein Pakistan jump at any opportunity to talkwith someone from Germany. "They say:`Wow! Cool! So you're in favour of Hitler!' "It's even worse, he says, when family comesto visit him in Pakistan's bustling capital. Theembarrassment might begin on the busy drivehome from the airport. "You'll find cars withthe Deutsches Kreuz, the German Cross. You'llfind people with stickers on their car saying'I LIKE NAZI' or `I LIKE HITLER."' And thenthere's the banter. "People start talking aboutHitler [in a] friendly way," Kazim explains.Even though "the people aren't Nazis," hesays that Nazi imagery is ubiquitous in Pak-istan's large cities. It took some time away,and then a move back to Islamabad eightmonths ago, for it to really resonate: "I only

realized now how many people like Hitler."Jonathan Solomon, a lawyer in Mumbai,

says the same revelation struck him when hewas browsing for books. "I was shocked tosee that Mein Kampf is available in Indianbookstores, even in the prestigious book-stores. It was not 1o years ago." Moreover,pirated copies of the book, in a country wherea 22-year ban on Salman Rushdie's SatanicVerses has still to be lifted, are available atstreet stalls. "It sells very well," says P.M.Shenvi, manager of the Strand Book Stall inMumbai. Today, publishers continue to churnout multiple reprints ofMein Kampf a yearto meet what R.H. Sharma, an editor at Mum-bai's Jaico Publishing House, insists is a sur-ging demand. In 2009, "we sold 10,000 cop-ies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops:'

Sharma has boasted.Perhaps Solomon should not have been

taken aback. In 2002, the English-languageTimes of India published a report showingthat Indian college students found much to

admire in the Fiihrer: namely, his efficiency,military strength and nationalism. The news-paper asked 400 elite college students, "Who'syour favourite leader from history?" Hitlercame in third, just behind Mahatma Gandhi.

"Because he made Germany a superpower,"was one student's response.

Of course, it's not just India where MeinKampfis topping the charts. In 2001, it became

a hot item after being introduced in Bulgaria.Soon afterwards, an Arabic translation becamethe sixth best seller in the Palestinian terri-tories, according to Agence France-Presse.("National Socialism did not die with thedeath of its herald," read its introduction.)Then, in 2005, the book took a top-seller spotin Turkey, selling over 100,000 copies injanu-ary and February alone-mostly, said pub-lishers, to males between 18 and 30. And, it'sbeen flying off Croatian shelves for years.

Not bad, for a badly written book. ("A bor-ing tome that I have never been able to read,"Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator,once jeered.) Hitler wrote Mein Kampf-partautobiography, part raving philosophicaltreatise-in 1923, while in jail for a failed plotto seize control of Munich. It eventually

became the holy book of the German NationalSocialist Party. Global sales figures are hardto estimate; the official rights to Mein Kampfare held by the German state of Bavaria, whichbans it from being printed. In the U.S. andU.K., the rights were seized when Hitler wasstill alive, and are privately held today. Hough-ton Mifflin, the U.S. publisher, told Maclean'sthat it sold 26,000 paperback copies in 2009.The U. K.'s Random House would not releaseits sales figures upon request. In many othercountries, however, the situation is less con-trolled, and small publishers are apt to printMein Kampf at will. Increasingly, they are

in Pakistan in part because ofa particularly Pakistani admira-tion for strong leaders. "Thecult of personality is strong,"says Niaz. When "the currentcrisis cannot be met by anyordinary leader, people are look-ing into history fora charismaticfigure." Aurangzeb Nazir, a24-year-old student in Islama-bad, told Maclean's, "Hitlerunited his nation and broughtit from the brink of collapse toglobal prominence. That's whywe look up to him:' It's certainlynot a new phenomenon. Oneof Pakistan's most beloved lead-ers, Zulfikar All Bhutto, alsosaw the loth century's mostfamous mass murderer as some-one to emulate. "Bhutto hadsilver-bound copies of MeinKampfm his library, says Niaz.

"He incorporated lines fromHitler's speeches directly intohis own oratory."

But much of the popularity,Niaz admits, has more to do with the presentthan the past: "It's an emotional response towhat is happening in Palestine." Besides thestruggle with India over Kashmir, it is Israeli-Palestinian relations that dominate Pakistan'sforeign policy consciousness, and sympathyfor the Palestinians and a deep distrust ofIsrael help fuel the cult of Hitler worship.Maqudas Ghumman, a 21-year -old inter-national relations student at Quaid -e-Azam,told Maclean's: "We admire Hitler partlybecause we want to remind Jews about whathappened to them and express our angerover what their leaders, the leaders theyadmire, are now doing to the Palestinians."

Not surprisingly, the Israeli issue alsoplays strongly into Palestinian sales of MeinKampf. Issa Ahwach owns Bissan, a Lebanese

CELEBRATING Hitler's 50th birthday in 1939 with a

feeding eager markets.military demonstration in Berlin (below)

Ilhas Niaz, history professorat Islamabad's Quaid-a-AzamUniversity, says Hitler fares well

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publishing house that prints an Arabic trans-lation for the Palestinian region. Throughan interpreter, he told Maclean's that saleshave held strong "because we are sufferinga similar kind of oppression under the Israelis.We can relate to what the Jews suffered."

In India, however, the situation is very dif-ferent. "This admiration for Hitler that wedo see in some circles is very much divorcedfrom his anti-Semitic policies," says YuliaEgorova, a social anthropologist and authorofJews and India: Perceptions and Image. His-torically, Egorova says, Hitler's popularitydates back to the 1920s and '30s, when thenationalist Subhas Chandra Bose saw theGerman leader as his country's ticket toindependence from colonial British rule andformed an Indian Legion to fight at Hitler'sside. "But at the same time he denouncedanti-Semitism'" Egorova says. Bose eventu-ally became disenchanted with Hitler, but insome places, his dubious image as a defenderof Indian sovereignty still stands.

How seriously should Indian interest inHitler be taken? Rafique Baghdadi, who runsthe Business India Book Club, calls MeinKampf a cult book, "rather like Ayn Rand'sThe Fountainhead. It isn't a book that yousee a lot of on local commuter trains." More

ominously, though, activist Teesta Setalvad,co-editor ofCommunalism Combat, a monthlyjournal aimed at promoting secularism,ascribes the revival of interest in Hitler'sideology to the rise of right-wing Hindu fun-damentalist politicians like the BharatiyaJanata Party's Narendra Modi, and the "hor-rendous tendency of India's upper middleclass that has always liked authoritarianism."Adds Egorova: "They [draw] parallels betweenthe Jewish question in Germany and theMuslim question in India."

Mumbai lawyer Solomon, who also headsthe Indian Jewish Federation, agrees. "Thereis no anti-Semitism in India," he says. ButMuslims, Solomon adds, are not safe: "It isa peculiar situation where we Jews have toraise our worries about these Nazi tacticsbeing used against our Muslim brethren."Tensions have grown because of recent ter-rorist attacks by Muslim foreigners, but theyhave deep roots. One famous Hindutva ideo-logue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, said in1949: "If you take Mein Kampf and if youremove the word Jew and put in the wordMuslim, that is what I believe in:'

In Turkey, the flourishing Islamic move-ment has spurred interest in Hitler and MeinKampf. "It is the Islamists rather than thefascists who have fuelled the sales," says pro-fessor Dogu Ergil of Ankara University. "Itwas a reaction against the war in Iraq andIsrael's actions in Palestine." Ergil says Islam-ist factions consciously boostedMein Kampf

CARS IN PAKISTANARE SPORTING`I LIKE HITLER'BUMPER STICKERS

sales in 2005 by printing the book in largenumbers and driving its market price downto $3: "This was done against Israel and Jews."Arnold Reisman, author of Turkey's Modern-ization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatiirk'sVision, also suspects state involvement in thesales, but he thinks the target of the plot wasbroader. "They are essentially saying: `Upyours, Europe!' " says Reisman. Turkey was

"lying on the floor begging" to gain EU mem-bership for years, but "they'll never get it-and they're beginning to see that. And as aresult, they're turning away from Europe."

In some instances of Hitler glorificationthere is a "wilful blindness" at work, saysSyed Jamaluddin, a history teacher at theKhaldunia high school in Islamabad. In 2005,

AT A right-wing party rally in Budapest; Hit-ler's Cross (left), a restaurant near Mumbai

the Indian state of Gujarat came under firefor issuing a textbook to high school students

that included a chapter on the "internalachievements of Nazism"; it instructed that

"Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the Ger-man government within a short time byestablishing a strong administrative set-up."(Teesta Setalvad has been leading the battleto amend the texts-"Thankfully, youngpeople in India today are realizing that eco-nomic growth is no justification for humanrights violations," she says.) But in Pakistan,says Jamaluddin, "The information is outthere but our young people are ignoring it.They're only seeing what they want to see. Itry to nail Hitler in my class. I try to destroyhim." Some are not listening. Sales of MeinKampfwere reportedly boosted by businessstudents who saw the book as a how-to guideto becoming a self-made man.

ELSEWHERE, Hitler's continuing legacy is farless innocuous. In Hungary, the far right'sforemost self-made man seems to have engagedin a closer reading of the Fiihrer's message. Injust four years, Gabor Vona, 31, a historyteacher with closely cropped hair and a pen-chant for T-shirts, has catapulted his Jobbikparty from the fanatical fringes to the main-stream, moving from only 2.2 per cent of thenational vote in 2006 to almost 17 per cent inlast Sunday's elections.

Vona keeps his speech tempered, distan-cing himself from overtly National Socialistrhetoric. But for many, his party's heatedplatform, which rests on an intense preoccu-pation with Hungary's 80,000 Roma, a con-sistent slew of attacks on "Israeli colonizers,"and a solemn vow to ban immigrants fromdiluting Hungarian purity, draws compari-sons that are tough to overlook. There arealso the party's more direct connections to

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neo-Nazi elements in Hungary. For starters,Jobbik's platform is carried on the shouldersof the Magyar Gdrda, the paramilitary corpsfounded by Vona in 2007. The uniformedwing is "redolent of the Hungarian Nazis, theArrow Cross Party, who during the war werereally important in carrying out the Holo-caust," says professor Jeffrey Kopstein, direc-tor of the University of Toronto's Centre forEuropean, Russian and Eurasian Studies. Theguard, illegal but still active, wears black andmarches in military formation, carrying ared and white flag similar to that of the ArrowCross. Ervin Nagy, a disillusioned formervice-president of Jobbik and a philosophylecturer at Karoly Gaspar University, hasadmitted that the guard was established toattract the extremist vote for a party reluc-tant to openly display Hitlerian imagery.

There are also extremist elements insideJobbik that, despite the party's efforts, maketheir violent tendencies known. Some partymembers have been linked to the extremeright-wing, anti-Semitic news portal www.kuruc.info. All this could still be dismissed asthe stirrings of a Budapest fringe-if Jobbikhad not just won a place in parliament. "Thisis not acceptable in a democracy," insistsAndras Gero, history professor at Budapest'sCentral European University (CEU).

Jobbik's presidential campaign chief ZsoltVarkonyi is quick to defend his party fromcomparisons to Hitler and the Nazis-

"nonsense," he told Maclean's. Indeed,Jobbiksupporters are not the swastika-emblazonedskinheads of the '90s; they are, largely, disen-chanted voters under 40. And Vona has builthis career not on a loyal adherence to MeinKampfbut on a blending of Hitlerian rhetoricthat evokes Hungary's past glory and more

modern concerns about globalization. It dearlystrikes a chord with today's hard-luck Hun-garians-one out of 10 are unemployed in thewake of the global recession. Says Geros:"Apart from the Nazi undertones, party propa-ganda plays heavily on Bolshevik ideals ofanti-capitalism-Hitler and Stalin meet at theextreme ends of the political spectrum."

In Austria, the Nazi-inspired Freedom Party

(FPO), which become the third-largest nationalparty in 2008, is also preoccupied by the

FUNDAMENTALISTS ININDIA FIND SOLACE INHITLER 'S PHILOSOPHYOF RACIAL PURITY

immigrant question. LeaderHeinz-Christian Strache has asolution: set up a ministry forthe deportation of immigrants.Strache vehemently denies aNazi link: "I was never a neo-Nazi and never will be." Buteven Austrian courts are notconvinced. When Strache sueda Vienna newsweekly for def-amation after it branded him a neo-Nazi, thecourt ruled that he indeed showed "an affinityto National Socialist thinking." It's not hardto see why. Photos of Strache, allegedly takenat a neo-Nazi training camp, have been leaked.(Strache says he was out for a day of paint-ball.) He was also photographed giving thethree-finger radical-right salute. (Stracheinsists he was ordering three beers, earninghim the nickname "Three Beers Strache.")He attacks Jewish bankers and veiled Muslim

women ("female ninjas"); he loathes global-ization and the EU; and he was once engagedto a girl whose father founded the Austrian

branch of the German neo-Nazi NationalDemocratic Party. Most recently, he cam-paigned to overturn the Verbotsgesetz, the1947 law banning Hitlerian ideology.

Unlike Jobbik, a relatively new Hungarianproduct, the FPO has a history with real Nazis:the party's founding fathers were two war-

time SS officers. And many high-ranking FPOofficials come from the Burschenschaften, asecretive network of right-wing duelling soci-eties that was banned after the Second WorldWar but made a resurgence in the 1950s. Nazifrontmen Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eich-man were Burschenschaften; so is Strache.

Because of Austrian law, of course, "theleadership of the party is careful not to playthe Nazi card too directly [since] the Naziparty is not legal," explains Anton Pelinka,professor of nationalism studies at CEU. "TheNazi manifesto is used indirectly. For example,with anti-Semitism, the party does not criti-cize Jews, it criticizes the `East Coast.' TheEast Coast is a code word for the New YorkJewish conspiracy." And behind it all, Pelinkasays, Hitler is there, "in the closet."

In the U.S., "I don't think there's any doubtat all that the radical right as a whole in theU.S. has been Nazified over the last 30 years,"says Mark Potok, spokesperson at the South-ern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advis-ory group that tracks American hate groups.But it's become a curious mix: in a 2009SPLC report on the rapid-fire growth ofAmerican right-wing militias, Potok and hiscolleagues wrote: "Militiamen, white suprem-acists, anti-Semites, nativists, tax protesters

and a range of other activistsof the radical right are cross-pollinating and may even becoalescing:'

There's also been a shift, saysPotok, away from the arche-typal enemy: African-Amer-icans. "It's not that the groupslike black people:' he explains.But they "now believe thatbehind black people, brownpeople, gay people, stands theJew. More of them have come

to a National Socialist view of the world: Jewsmanipulate everyone else." Of course, theold racism remains: in 2008, two white suprem-acist skinheads were arrested for plotting tokill Barack Obama and 88 more at a pre-dominantly black school before beheading14. In neo-Nazi circles, "88" is code for "HeilHitler," while "14" is a reference to "FourteenWords" from Mein Kampf. "We must securethe existence of our people and a future forwhite children."

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MEMBERS OF Jobbik's paramilitary wing at a rally in Budapest; Hitler's MeinKampf has been a bestseller in India, Turkey and the Palestinian territories

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Changing racial demographics have un-doubtedly fanned the U.S. flame. In 2008,the U.S. Census Bureau issued a report pre-dicting that whites would fall below 50 percent of the American population by 2050. "Ican tell you that the year 2050 is imprintedon the brain of everywhite nationalist in thiscountry," says Potok. "That's Armageddonfor them." As a result, the SPLC reports, hategroups, many of them with neo-Nazi ele-ments, are thriving-the SPLC located almost1,000. But Leonard Ziskind, author of Bloodand Politics: The History of the White Nation-alistMovementfrom theMargins to theMain-stream, points out that today's AmericanNational Socialists might be harder to spotthan their 1990s forefathers. "You have rad-ical neo-Nazis actually covering up their swas-tikas, trying to become more mainstream."In a crowd, you couldn't pick them out: "Theseare people who fly the American flag."

AROUND THE world, efforts to ban Hitler'swords, along with other evocations of hisThird Reich, continue-an implicit acknow-ledgment of the Fiihrer's continuing polit-ical potency. Just last month, Rus-sian prosecutors officially bannedMein Kampfas "extremist," makingthe sale and distribution of the bookpunishable by fine. In a public state-ment, the prosecutor-general's officejudged that Hitler's vitriolic rantdeserves blacklisting because it

"justifies discrimination and destruc-tion of non-Aryan races."

The action follows a spate of far-right violence, in this country thatlost 26.6 million people in the waragainst Nazi Germany. Most wereattacks on foreigners and migrantworkers; SOYA, a Russian research centre thattracks xenophobia, estimates that last year 71people were killed and 333 injured in hateattacks. Shortly before the ban was introduced,Mein Kampfwas reportedly being distributedin Ufa, a region where ultra-right groups areactive. Matthew Light, a criminology profes-sor at the University ofToronto and an experton Russia, is not surprised to see officials pan-icking. "The Russian government has becomemore afraid of skinheads and other extreme-right organizations," Light explains. "Whereasin the past they saw them as an outlet forpeople to vent their frustration, they nowthink this kind of movement is potentiallythreatening to the government itself."

It is easy to dismiss Mein Kampf, GalinaKozhevnikova, deputy head of SOYA, says"it's been a long time since this book by Hit-ler was of ideological importance. Hitler'stext is archaic and out of date." And yet itremains a charged symbol. In China, Mein

Kampf is forbidden except for research pur-poses and exists only in special libraries-asis also the case in Brazil. In the Netherlands,selling the book is illegal, although owningor lending it is not. In Canada, the book canbe sold legally, but a de facto ban has beenin place since Indigo CEO Heather Reismanbanished it from her shelves in 2001. In France,it's legal to sell the book, but only if it is his-torically annotated. In Austria and Germany,Mein Kampfis banned.

Recent efforts to challenge that injunctionin Germany have been blasted by the stateof Bavaria, which explained in a statementto Maclean's that it maintains the ban out ofrespect for Holocaust victims. But in 2015,the state's rights to Mein Kampfwill expire,the book will enter the public domain, and

ONE EXPERT SAYSRADICAL U.S. NEO-NAZIS ARE TRYINGTO GO MAINSTREAM

officials are counting down the time withgrowing unease. "Once Bavaria's copyrightexpires," warned state science minister Wolf-gang Heubisch in February, "there is the dan-ger of charlatans and neo-Nazis appropriat-ing this infamous book for themselves."

As a result, Bavaria is maintaining its gripon Mein Kampfuntil the clock runs out, con-tinuing to go after publishers that try toreprint it. When a small Czech publisherbegan printing Mein Kampf in 2000, the Bav-arian prime minister wrote a letter to then-Czech president Vaclav Havel, begging himto put a stop to it. In 2005, when a Polishman's plan to print a version was revealed bythe Associated Press, state officials were urgedto get involved directly with Warsaw. Andwhen a Spanish translation appeared oniTunes in 2009, Bavarian officials forced Appleto take it down.

The fear of Hitler and Nazism as a politicalrallying cry remains. Germany, says Richard

J. Evans, a Cambridge professor and one ofthe most prolific scholars of the Second WorldWar, has been relatively successful in reiningin its extreme-right wing. The grounds for thatwere laid in the postwar period, when the Alliesdirected an aggressive "de-nazification" cam-paign in the former Third Reich-one followedby a period of obsessive German self-scrutinyin the 196os. But in other countries, like Aus-tria, the process was never completed. "Aus-tria," says Evans, "never came to terms withthe past." (Note, he says, the dearth of Holo-caust memorials there.) Evans explains that

"most Austrians were happy to be incorpor-ated into Germany with the Anshluss," eventhough after the war they would "treat them-selves as the first victims of Nazism, and that'show the Allies treated them." That incompletepostwar de-nazification might in part explainwhy, today, the political opposition is run bya party founded out of the SS.

But the state of the current world economyis also fuelling the trend. When the Berlin Wallfell in 1989, says Annette Timm, professor ofEuropean history at the University of Calgary,those Germans who joined up with neo-Nazis

"were the ones who fell through thecracks after reunification and neededsomething to identify with." Today,Timm says, it is again the down and

out "looking for something to feelpassionate about." It's not surprisingthat support for Austria's FreedomParty is high among those withouthigh school degrees, or that in Hun-gary, one of Europe's most sufferingmarkets, a Nazi-inspired party isfaring so well.

Evans stresses that this can happenbecause Nazism "adapts and changesto present-day circumstances." Rather

than featuring thuggish skinheads, the farright now runs "young, good-looking whitemen" like Hungary's Vona and Austria's Strache.In most cases, it's not exactly time to panic-Evans says that in spite of some gains, neo-Nazism still remains to a great extent "on thefringe of society." But he still finds it all "worry-ing:' given today's mass unemployment andrecession. The cautious scholar grants that, asof now, the appropriation of Hitlerian ideol-ogy is mostly part of"a protest movement," away of sending a clear message of frustrationto the government. But "that's what Nazismstarted out as:' says Evans. "In the 1930s whenpeople voted for the Nazis, they were votingout of protest: not necessarily because theysupported the whole ideological package."And, he adds bleakly, "We all know the resultsof that voting." M

With Andras Badics, Utku Basar,Tom Henheffer, Naazneen Karmali

and Adnan R. Khan

GERMAN riot police at a demonstration by the neo-NaziNational Democratic Party in Hamburg last fall

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