BERLIN — Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” been officially published in German. Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author’s death.

That allows a team of historians from a noted center for the study of Nazism, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, to publish its two-volume, 2,000-page edition, a three-year labor complete with about 3,500 academic annotations.

The intention is to set the work in historical context, to show how Hitler wove truth with half-truth and outright lie, and thus to defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism.

“This is really one of the best relics we have of the Third Reich,” said Christian Hartmann, the historian who led the five-person team on the project and unveiled the work to journalists on Tuesday. He compared it to Hitler’s lair at Obersalzberg in the Alps, which two million visitors a year now view, passing first through an exhibit on Nazism designed by the institute.