Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

and Marxists, their whole campaign of lies and slander, were for him the sole happiness amid
the misery of our people.
A man of granite honesty, of antique simplicity and German straightforwardness, for whom
the words 'Sooner dead than a slave ' were no phrase but the essence of his whole being.
He and his collaborator, Dr. Frick, are in my eyes the only men in a state position who
possess the right to be called cocreators of a national Bavaria.
Before we proceeded to hold our first mass meeting, not only did the necessary propaganda
material have to be made ready, but the main points of the program also had to be put into
print.
In the second volume I shall thoroughly develop the guiding principles which we had in
mind, particularly in framing the program. Here I shall only state that it was done, not only
to give the young movement form and content, but to make its aims understandable to the
broad masses.
Circles of the so-called intelligentsia have mocked and ridiculed this and attempted to
criticize it. But the soundness of our point of view at that time has been shown by the
effectiveness of this program.
In these years I have seen dozens of new movements arise and thev have all vanished and
evaporated without trace. A single one remains: The National Socialist German Workers'
Party. And today more than ever I harbor the conviction that people can combat it, that they
can attempt to paralyze it, that petty party ministers can forbid us to speak and write, but
that they will never prevent the victory of our ideas.
When not even memory will reveal the names of the entire present-day state conception and
its advocates, the fundamentals of the National Socialist program will be the foundations of a
coming state.
Our four months' activities at meetings up to January, 1920, had slowly enabled us to save
up the small means that we needed for printing our first leaflet, our first poster, and our
program.
If I take the movement's first large mass meeting as the conclusion of this volume, it is
because by it the party burst the narrow bonds of a small club and for the first time exerted
a determining infiuence on the mightiest factor of our tirne, public opinion.
I myself at that time had but one concern: Will the hall be filled, or will we speak to a
yawning hall? 1 I had the unshakable l inner conviction that if the people came, the day was
sure to be a great success for the young movement. And so I anxiously looked forward to that
evening.
The meeting was to be opened at 7:30. At 7:15 I entered the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus on
the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst for joy. The gigantic hall-for at that time it
still seemed to me gigantic-was overcrowded with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass
numbering almost two thousand people. And above all-those people to whom we wanted to
appeal had come. Far more than half the hall seemed to be occupied by Communists and
Independents. They had resolved that our first demonstration would come to a speedy end.
But it turned out differently. After the first speaker had finished, I took the floor. A few
minutes later there was a hail of shouts, there were violent dashes in the hall, a handful of
the most faithful war comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers, and only
little by little were able to restore order.
I was able to go on speaking. After half an hour the applause slowly began to drown out the
screaming and shouting.
I now took up the program and began to explain it for the first time.
From minute to minute the interruptions were increasingly drowned out by shouts of
applause. And when I finally submitted the twenty-five theses, point for point, to the masses
and asked them personally to pronounce judgment on them, one after another was accepted
with steadily mounting joy, unanimously and again unanimously, and when the last thesis