A new edition of the German dictator’s text with thousands of explanatory notes will be sold at bookshops with an initial print run limited to about 4,000

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

For the first time since the second world war, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will be printed in Germany in January as an annotated edition, the institute publishing it has said.



The autobiographical text will return to the public domain at the start of the year and hit bookshops between 8 January and 11 January, said Andreas Wirsching, director of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ) in Munich.

The book, which adds context to the Nazi dictator’s hateful rant with some 3,500 annotations, will be published in two volumes totalling 1,948 pages and sold at €59 ($62), said Wirsching, who has been working on the project since 2009.

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The first run of Hitler, Mein Kampf. A Critical Edition would be limited to 3,500 to 4,000 copies, he said.

Plans to publish the new version have been controversial and drawn fire especially from Jewish groups, who have argued the book is dangerous and should never be printed again.

But Wirsching said the re-publication of the text with expert commentary aimed to “shatter the myth” surrounding the book, which Hitler wrote in 1924 while languishing in prison after a failed coup.

Authorities in the southern state of Bavaria were handed the copyright by Allied forces after the second world war.

For seven decades, they have refused to allow it to be republished out of respect for victims of the Nazis and to prevent incitement of hatred.

But at the end of the year the copyright runs out, meaning Mein Kampf – or My Struggle – falls into the public domain on 1 January.

“This is not just a source” for the study of Nazi ideology, said the historian responsible for the project, Christian Hartmann. “It is also a symbol and it is one of the last relics of the Third Reich.”