AN OXFAM charity shop in Dublin has become the owner of a rare 1939 copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampfafter it was found in a bag of old books from an unidentified donor.

The uncensored leather-bound edition, which is on sale for €400, contains all of Hitler’s original text, detailing his belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race and his anti-Semitic agenda, and more than 200 illustrations and photographs. One of the first English editions, it was translated by Irishman James Murphy.

“We had it for a couple of weeks there and no one really looked at it,” Solène Rapinel, the manager of Oxfam on George’s Street said.

It was only after one of the staff noticed the book while sorting through the stacks that they looked into it. “We started looking on Amazon, and then we understood we had something interesting,” she said.

The book has been on display since Tuesday afternoon and has attracted interest from some customers. “We had one complaint, saying Oxfam shouldn’t sell this kind of propaganda,” Rapinel said, though most customers just wonder why it is so expensive.

“The one who’s going to buy it will be someone who doesn’t necessarily shop in Oxfam,” she said. “It will be someone who wants to collect this kind of book . . . someone who loves books.”

Anne L’Henoret from the Oxfam bookshop on Parliament Street said the specialist shop does occasionally come across rare donations. “We’ve had Bibles from the 17th century, we’ve had a first edition of The Commitments– we’ve had a lot of things like that that stood out,” she said.

The shop has come across copies of Mein Kampfbefore, but hasn’t put the “bog-standard paperbacks” on sale. “We have this dilemma – do we sell something that we don’t politically agree with, but then it raises money for Oxfam and for our work?” The 1939 edition is different, she said. “This is a historical document, because it’s a very unusual edition as well.”

The translator, Murphy, an Irishman educated in St Patrick’s College Maynooth, wrote a biography of Hitler and translated books by scientists such as Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger.