Replies

I have found it exceedingly difficult to dredge clarity out of Mein Kampf, it being what it was, a torrent of pop romanticism, ill-understood pop biology, and half-digested pop historiography. Hitler was not a formally educated man, but an autodidact with an extremely spotty reading list that he stopped adding to in his late 20's, having learned everything there was to learn at that point.

You're simply not going to get a great deal of meaningful formal philosophy from that mess, try as you might to find influences. Schopenhauer, certainly, and more than a little of Hegel and Marx as the author cites, but no real firm grasp of any of them. Citing one's focus of hostility - in his case the Jews - as being contrary to nature is not, IMHO, a precocious case of eco-madness but a habit that goes back at least to Rousseau. What drove Hitler was hatred, passion, and paranoia, not philosophy.