Plans to sell Mein Kampf extracts in Germany dropped

Munich - A plan by a publisher to sell extracts from Adolf Hitler's book “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”) on the streets of Germany has been withdrawn following a series of complaints.

The BBC reports that a British publisher, Peter McGee, had devised a scheme to sell extracts from Hitler’s political memoir in Germany where the entire book is banned, except for academic study (the publishing of Nazi-themed works in Germany remains a contentious issue). As China Daily notes the extracts were to appear in bound reproductions of newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s until the title “Zeitungszeugen” (15-page brochures with an initial print run of 100,000 copies each). The plan was thwarted by the German state of Bavaria, which owns the copyright to the book, threatening legal proceedings. The rights to Hitler's manuscript were transferred by the allies after the war to the Bavarian government, based in Munich, because it had been Hitler's home state until his suicide in 1945. As Der Spiegel recounts, Bravia has taken action in the past to stop the publisher from selling Nazi-themed material (such a re-prints of newspapers like Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter). According to Voz Iz Neias, Peter McGee runs a publishing firm called Albertas which sells reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers and other related material. The publisher will continue with the plan to produce and sell the material, but all text relating to “Mein Kampf” will be rendered illegible. However, reproductions with the legible text will be available via mail order. The publisher has stated that his aim was, by publishing the material, to expose Hitler’s ‘crude ideas’. The wider concern is that neo-Nazi activity is increasing in Germany and any publication of Hitler’s works could lend credibility to fascist ideas. In terms of the future, a book copyright expires 70 years after the death of an author. This means that in 2015 all copyright restrictions are removed.