On February 11, 1926, the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler was published in Munich. The book combined elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler’s political ideology, including his views on race, nationalism, and the future of Germany. Mein Kampf originated in a series of dictations Hitler made to his deputy, Rudolf Hess, while imprisoned in Landsberg following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. The text was intended both to explain Hitler’s experiences and to outline the program he would pursue politically. The initial publication came at a time when the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) was still marginal in Weimar politics. Early sales were modest, but the book provided a written statement of positions—territorial revisionism, anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, and a rejection of the post–World War I Versailles settlement—that would later underpin Nazi policy. The work’s mixture of personal narrative, political argument, and prophetic assertions about the future contributed to its appeal among supporters and its alarm to opponents. Mein Kampf was published in two volumes; the second volume appeared later in 1926. The book’s legal and commercial history is complex: Hitler retained rights and profited from its sales, and it became an important revenue source for him and the party. After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Mein Kampf was heavily promoted, often given to newlywed couples or distributed through state-supported channels; printings and translations increased during the Third Reich, expanding its reach both within Germany and internationally. Scholars and contemporaries have long debated the book’s literary quality versus its ideological danger. Many historians regard Mein Kampf as a manifesto that lays out core elements of Nazi ideology rather than as a tightly argued political treatise. Its combination of grandiose rhetorical claims and pseudoscientific racial theories helped legitimize the regime’s later policies of expansion and persecution. The book’s publication and subsequent dissemination are thus seen as significant steps in the development and normalization of Nazi ideology. After World War II, the copyright situation and the moral implications of distributing Mein Kampf generated controversy. In Germany and elsewhere, restrictions and debates continued for decades about reprinting and annotating the text; scholarly critical editions have since been produced to enable historical study while providing contextualization and commentary. The publication of Mein Kampf on February 11, 1926, therefore marks a consequential moment: the formal presentation of ideas that would shape one of the 20th century’s most destructive regimes.