Mein Kampf
When I recognized the Jew as the leader of Social Democracy, the scales began to fall from my eyes. With this a long spiritual struggle came to an end.
Even in daily contact with my fellow-workmen I was struck by the extraordinary chameleon power by which they took several attitudes toward a single question, often within a few days, sometimes even within a few hours. I could scarcely understand how people who, taken singly, still held reasonable views could suddenly lose them the moment they came under the spell of the masses. Often it was enough to drive one to despair. I would argue for hours, and finally believe that this time at last I had broken the ice or cleared away some piece of nonsense, and would be feeling heartily glad of my success; and then the next day I would be grieved to find that I had to begin all over again. It had all been futile. The madness of their opinions seemed always to swing back again like a perpetual pendulum.
I could understand everything; that they were dissatisfied with their lot, cursed Fate, which often dealt them such hard knocks; hated the business men, who seemed to them the heartless tools of this Fate; railed at government offices, which in their eyes had no feeling for the workers’ situation; that they demonstrated against food prices, and marched through the streets in support of their demands—all this one could still understand without referring to reason. But what I could not understand was the boundless hatred they felt for their own people, the way they despised its grandeur, defiled its history, and dragged great men in the gutter.
This struggle against their own kind, their own nest, their own homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was unnatural.
They could be temporarily cured of this vice, but only for days, for weeks at most. If later one met a supposed convert, he had fallen back into his old self. His unnatural tendencies would have him again in their grip.
That the Social Democratic press was conducted predominantly by Jews I gradually came to realize; but I attached no
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