It’s been available online for more than a decade, but now, the German magazine Zeitungszeugen intends to publish excerpts from the controversial tome Adolf Hitler wrote while imprisoned in a Bavarian prison, following the failed Munich Putsch revolution.
This has raised the hackles of the Bavarian state government, which was given the copyrights to the book after World War II by Allied Forces. The copyright was granted in 1945 and expires in 2015, a full 70 years after Hitler’s death. While the publication of Mein Kampf is not banned, strictly speaking, according to the WaPo, the Bavarian government “has used its ownership of the copyright to prevent its publication so far.”
The man who wants to publish the excerpts is Peter McGee, who plans to make available nearly 50 pages of Mein Kampf. He was warned by the Bavarian Finance Ministry against publishing, but McGee says his attorneys have told him it should not be legally problematic, adding,
We’re not surprised that they’ve taken that reaction from Munich but it’s a little difficult to see how they say that when they haven’t seen the product. … We’re not publishing ‘Mein Kampf,’ we’re publishing … some excerpts of ‘Mein Kampf’ with some critical commentary.”
According to the article, the move has been decried by leadership of Jewish groups, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, who call publication of the book “a moral offense to the memory of all Nazi victims.”
For his part, McGee argues:
The problem with this book in Germany is that because it’s unavailable, because it’s been blocked in Germany, it’s been allowed to develop this mystique,” he said. “If you shine a very bright light on it so people can see it for themselves with some structure and analysis, I think it will be one small part of demystifying the aura, the taboo that exists around it.
However, publication of the book is not regarded so fearfully in other countries with disparate copyright laws. Among those territories are the US and the UK, in which publication is done freely as the rights had been sold during Hitler’s own lifetime.
