Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ Spurs Legal Fight

Plans by a British publisher to make segments of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” available in the German language may run into legal trouble.

Publisher Peter McGee said he plans to publish three annotated excerpts of the text, which remains under copyright protection in Germany until 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death, according to the Associated Press. The Bavarian Finance Ministry, which holds the copyright, told AP on Tuesday that plans to print excerpts in Germany before then may violate the law.

While a U.S.-based Holocaust survivors’ organization opposes McGee’s move, Dieter Graumann, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Der Spiegel that he would not object to the annotated publication of the text in Germany. Hitler wrote his anti-Semitic diatribe in 1924 while in prison in Landsberg. He later left the printing rights to the state of Bavaria, which has banned publication in Germany and tried to prevent it elsewhere.

In 2010, the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History was granted permission to reprint the work after the copyright lapses. Historians there are working on an annotated edition.

Bavarian authorities have reiterated frequently that they would not lift the ban prematurely in Germany out of concern that right-wingers could legally use it. But Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told reporters in 2009 that it made sense to publish the book “to prevent neo-Nazis from profiting from it” and to “remove many of its false, persistent myths.”

The book is available to researchers in libraries, but it is currently not legal to publish it in Germany. However, translations of the book are available abroad and sometimes make their way into Germany. In addition, unauthorized versions are available on far-right and Islamic extremist websites based outside of Germany. Germany bans public display of Nazi symbols and hate material, including on the Internet.

In 2007, historian Horst Moller of the Munich-based institute told journalists that a scholarly edition “won’t be something for neo-Nazis, whose reading skills are likely to be limited anyway.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.