In April 1945, as he contemplated the ruins of the Third Reich from his bunker beneath the Reichskanzlei, Adolf Hitler could at least take some small comfort from the fact that he was a very wealthy man. Defining Hitler's personal wealth was no easy task, of course, for the distinction between Hitler's private property and the property of the German state had become thoroughly blurred by the end of the Second World War. Hitler had acquired his collection of approximately 10,000 works of art largely through the murderous agencies of the Nazi kleptocracy, and some might even question the propriety of the royalties charged to the German government for the right to reproduce his likeness on the nation's postage stamps. Even if we exclude items like these from his wealth, however, Hitler had earned a substantial fortune through his career as an author. Mein Kampf, Hitler's mix of autobiography and anti-Semitic rant, was one of the bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth century, and it continues to sell almost 20,000 copies in English each year.
Mein Kampf had inauspicious beginnings. Hitler dictated it to Rudolph Hess and Emil Maurice in the Bavarian prison of Landsberg am Lech, where they spent 1923-24 after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, and he originally intended to title it A Four and One-Half Year Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice: Settling Accounts with the Destroyers of the National Socialist Movement. Under the punchier title Mein Kampf, it sold a relatively modest 9,000 copies in 1925, though sales soared along with Hitler's political career, reaching 54,000 in 1930 and 850,000 in 1933, the year he became German chancellor. Over the next nine years, the German government purchased six million copies of the work—a copy was given as a gift from the government to every pair of newlyweds in Germany. Hitler earned immense amounts from these sales. By 1945, a total of 8 million copies had sold; at their peak, his royalties reached an estimated $1 million per year.
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