For a few months, there was furious competition between the two publishers. Stackpole advertised that it paid no royalties to Hitler, to which Reynal & Hitchcock responded by promising all profits from the book to a refugee relief fund. Stackpole in turn committed 5 percent of all of its proceeds to refugee relief, while Reynal & Hitchcock scored a coup by getting their edition of Mein Kampf distributed through the Book of the Month Club, which guaranteed royalties of $10,000 to the publisher and $20,000 to its refugee fund. With war imminent in Europe, sales were brisk—Reynal & Hitchcock’s edition alone sold thirty thousand copies in the first month. Then, on 9 June 1939, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that stateless authors were indeed entitled to American copyright protection—in a pre-conference memorandum, Judge Charles Clark, who authored the court’s opinion, wrote, “I think it would be a terrible thing to deny these homeless persons even literary property nowadays”—and Stackpole was enjoined from selling its translation.1 Houghton Mifflin’s copyright was secure, at the considerable legal expense of $23,000. Eher Verlag agreed to pay half of these costs, and by the time they were recouped from Mein Kampf’s royalties, it was December 1941, America and Germany were at war, and Hitler never did see any payments from the edition.

With the outbreak of war, the Allies stopped worrying about Hitler’s copyright. In England, Hutchinson released an eighteen-part serialized edition to benefit the British Red Cross. The book jacket prominently, and without permission, advertised its relationship to the Red Cross. The Red Cross protested the unauthorized use of its name and expressed doubts in a letter to Hutchinson about the propriety of accepting “tainted money,” but it ultimately decided to receive the edition’s £500 in royalties. In the United States, matters were handled more directly. The US government, invoking the Trading With the Enemy Act, seized all royalties due Hitler and dedicated them to the War Claims Fund, which assisted war refugees and American prisoners of war. By 1945, more than $20,000 in royalties had been collected.