Fuhrer furore: new edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ poised to hit German bookshelves

For 70 years since the Nazi defeat in the second world war, copyright law has been used in Germany to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf — the notorious anti-Semitic tome in which Adolf Hitler set out his ideology.

That will change next month when a new edition with critical commentary, the product of several years’ work by a publicly funded institute, hits the shelves.

While historians say it could help fill a gap in Germans' knowledge of the era, Jewish groups are wary and German authorities are making it clear that they still won't tolerate any new Mein Kampf without annotations.

Under German law, a copyright expires at the end of the year 70 years after an author’s death — in this case, Hitler’s April 30, 1945, suicide in a Berlin bunker as the Soviet army closed in. That means Bavaria’s state finance ministry, which holds the copyright, can no longer use it to prevent the work’s publication beyond December 31.

The book has been published in several other countries; in the US, for example, Bavaria never controlled the copyright.

In Germany, many argue that holding back Mein Kampf merely created mystique around the book. The idea of at least a partial version with critical commentary for the German market dates back as far as the late 1960s. The Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, which is behind the new version, sought and was denied permission to produce the book in the mid-1990s when it published a volume of Hitler’s speeches.