Christo­pher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — impe­ri­al­ism, fas­cism, and Stal­in­ism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them.

Orwell dis­plays his remark­able fore­sight in a fas­ci­nat­ing book review, pub­lished in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s noto­ri­ous auto­bi­og­ra­phy Mein Kampf. In the review, the author deft­ly cuts to the root of Hitler’s tox­ic charis­ma, and, along the way, antic­i­pates themes to appear in his future mas­ter­pieces, Ani­mal Farm and 1984.

The fact is that there is some­thing deeply appeal­ing about him. […] Hitler … knows that human beings don’t only want com­fort, safe­ty, short work­ing-hours, hygiene, birth-con­trol and, in gen­er­al, com­mon sense; they also, at least inter­mit­tent­ly, want strug­gle and self-sac­ri­fice, not to men­tion drums, flags and loy­al­ty-parades. How­ev­er they may be as eco­nom­ic the­o­ries, Fas­cism and Nazism are psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly far sounder than any hedo­nis­tic con­cep­tion of life.

Yet Orwell was cer­tain­ly no fan of Hitler. At one point in the review, he imag­ines what a world where the Third Reich suc­ceeds might look like:

What [Hitler] envis­ages, a hun­dred years hence, is a con­tin­u­ous state of 250 mil­lion Ger­mans with plen­ty of “liv­ing room” (i.e. stretch­ing to Afghanistan or there- abouts), a hor­ri­ble brain­less empire in which, essen­tial­ly, noth­ing ever hap­pens except the train­ing of young men for war and the end­less breed­ing of fresh can­non-fod­der.

The arti­cle was writ­ten at a moment when, as Orwell notes, the upper class was backpedal­ing hard against their pre­vi­ous sup­port of the Third Reich. In fact, a pre­vi­ous edi­tion of Mein Kampf — pub­lished in 1939 in Eng­land — had a dis­tinct­ly favor­able view of the Führer.

“The obvi­ous inten­tion of the translator’s pref­ace and notes [was] to tone down the book’s feroc­i­ty and present Hitler in as kind­ly a light as pos­si­ble. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the Ger­man labour move­ment, and for that the prop­er­ty-own­ing class­es were will­ing to for­give him almost any­thing. Then sud­den­ly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all.”

By March 1940, every­thing had changed, and a new edi­tion of Mein Kampf, reflect­ing chang­ing views of Hitler, was pub­lished in Eng­land. Britain and France had declared war on Ger­many after its inva­sion of Poland but real fight­ing had yet to start in West­ern Europe. With­in months, France would fall and Britain would teeter on the brink. But, in the ear­ly spring of that year, all was pret­ty qui­et. The world was col­lec­tive­ly hold­ing its breath. And in this moment of ter­ri­fy­ing sus­pense, Orwell pre­dicts much of the future war.

When one com­pares his utter­ances of a year or so ago with those made fif­teen years ear­li­er, a thing that strikes one is the rigid­i­ty of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t devel­op. It is the fixed vision of a mono­ma­ni­ac and not like­ly to be much affect­ed by the tem­po­rary manoeu­vres of pow­er pol­i­tics. Prob­a­bly, in Hitler’s own mind, the Rus­so-Ger­man Pact rep­re­sents no more than an alter­ation of timetable. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Rus­sia first, with the implied inten­tion of smash­ing Eng­land after­wards. Now, as it has turned out, Eng­land has got to be dealt with first, because Rus­sia was the more eas­i­ly bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when Eng­land is out of the pic­ture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a dif­fer­ent ques­tion.

In June of 1941, Hitler invad­ed Rus­sia, in one of the great­est strate­gic blun­ders in the his­to­ry of mod­ern war­fare. Stal­in was com­plete­ly blind­sided by the inva­sion and news of Hitler’s betray­al report­ed­ly caused Stal­in to have a ner­vous break­down. Clear­ly, he didn’t read Mein Kampf as close­ly as Orwell had.

You can read Orwell’s full book review here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s Polit­i­cal Views, Explained in His Own Words

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.