In A Nutshell
It’s kept under lock and key in a vault in Bavaria, it was legal to own but illegal to reprint in Germany for 70 years, and there’s a comic book version issued in Japan. Mein Kampf is easily one of the most disputed books in history, and at one point, Houghton Mifflin started suing other American publishing companies for the sole rights to release it in the United States. Its controversy hasn’t gone away, either. Bavaria’s copyright ran out at the end of 2015, and German historians put the first new print edition since the war into shops days later, with more than 3,500 annotations attached.
The Whole Bushel
Today, the publishing of Mein Kampf can be looked at with the clarity of hindsight, and in some places, it’s still a dangerous, terrifying thing, even decades later. In the Bavarian State Library, Nazi-era copies of the book are kept under lock and key in a special room where all the most dangerous and toxic pieces of literature are kept. German libraries have a centuries old name for that kind of room: the Giftschrank, or poison cabinet. Anyone who wants to get a look at it has to submit a formal request to do so, a request that’s checked out by a group of experts to make sure it’s not getting into the wrong hands.
It didn’t fly off the shelves at first, though. The first run of 10,000 copies mostly sold, then interest sagged. Sales only started climbing in 1930, when the Nazis made big gains at the polls, and by late 1932 the book had shifted just under 230,000 copies. Then Hitler took power in 1933 and more than 850,000 copies went out that year alone, helped along by a publisher that pushed hard on the public, on German institutions, and on Nazi organizations to buy copies. By the end of 1944, over 12 million had been printed. Plenty of them are still out there. The rambling, 700-page work was more likely to be given as a wedding gift than to serve as anyone’s bedtime reading.
In the US, though, it was at the center of a weird lawsuit as major publishers fought over the rights.
In the 1930s, American publishers were scrambling to reserve the rights to print Hitler’s bizarre book. Houghton Mifflin was among the first to do so in a complete form, around 270,000 words. Noram Publishing Company wasn’t far behind, but rather than release the whole thing, they chose to make an abridged version. About 32 pages long, the book came with notes and maps to make the ramblings easier to understand. The man behind it was Alan Cranston, then a journalist of 25 who would go on to spend decades as a US senator from California. He had read the book in German, decided American readers were getting a softened version, and priced his own at 10 cents against the $3 edition. His cover promised “Not one cent of royalty to Hitler”. Houghton Mifflin sued their competitor in 1939, demanding they be the only one allowed to print it. And they won, forcing Noram to destroy the abridged copies printed, about 500,000 of them.
So where does the money from Hitler’s book actually go? Houghton Mifflin picked up the American rights in 1933 and kept the book in print for decades afterward. It stopped keeping the profits in 2000. Then came a 2016 argument over spending them on general cultural causes, and the publisher agreed that year to hand the money to Jewish Family & Children’s Service of Greater Boston, earmarked for the care of aging Holocaust survivors.
After the end of World War II, Germany banned the publishing of the book, the rights of which had been handed to Bavaria by the Allies. (The book itself was never actually banned, only the reprinting of it.) The state of Bavaria blocked any attempts to get around the laws or purchase the rights for the next 70 years. Then the clock ran out. The copyright expired at midnight on December 31, 2015, and the first new print edition of Mein Kampf came from a strange source: the German people.
That source was the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, which released the book again on January 8, 2016, as a completely annotated version complete with analysis, notes, critiques, and criticisms designed to preserve history (as historical societies do). It ran to two volumes and roughly 2,000 pages, carried more than 3,500 annotations, and cost €59. But with the institute getting much of its funding from the taxpayers, their decision to re-release it at all was unsurprisingly controversial. Bavaria itself offered €500,000 toward the work, then cancelled the funding in December 2013 after the state’s leader changed his mind.
Nobody was sure anyone would buy the thing. The institute printed just 4,000 copies against 15,000 advance orders, and the first run disappeared almost immediately. Over 85,000 copies went in the first year. A decade on, as of 2026, the institute reports more than 112,000 sold and a 15th printing in shops, and since July 2022 it has offered the whole annotated edition free online.
Public domain didn’t mean a free for all, though. Owning an old copy or selling one secondhand has never been a crime in Germany, but officials said from the start that they would treat unannotated reprints as incitement under the country’s hate speech law. They meant it. In April 2024, a court in Dresden convicted three people who had worked for a far right publisher that sold an unannotated edition for €30, alongside a heap of other racist and antisemitic material.
Historian and writer Andrew Nagorski points out the sort of disarming effect that Mein Kampf had in America. It was so vitriolic and hateful that it was easy for people to think that it must be composed of figures of speech instead of any literal hate or plan for the future.
In other countries, though, Mein Kampf has had something of a different effect in a different form. In Japan, there’s a comic book version of it, put out in 2008 as part of a series that squeezes classics down into manga, and it sold around 45,000 copies in its first year. In India, where the book has run through hundreds of editions since 1928, it’s become known as a self-help book.
Show Me The Proof
Featured photo via Wikipedia
Smithsonian: Houghton Mifflin Once Sued Another Publisher on Behalf of Hitler and Mein Kampf
The Atlantic: Early Warnings: How American Journalists Reported the Rise of Hitler
Washington Post: ‘Mein Kampf’: A historical tool, or Hitler’s voice from beyond the grave?
New Yorker: Defusing “Mein Kampf”
Holocaust Encyclopedia: Mein Kampf: Hitler’s Manifesto
Wikipedia: Mein Kampf
BBC News: Copyright of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf expires
Institute for Contemporary History: Hitler, Mein Kampf. A Critical Edition
Deutsche Welle: How Germany deals with ‘Mein Kampf’
CBC News: Why Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is stirring up new tensions
The Times of Israel: US publisher to give ‘Mein Kampf’ proceeds to survivors
evangelisch.de: Haft- und Bewährungsstrafen in Prozess um Neonaziverlag
Fortune: Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ Sold Out Immediately After Going on Sale
99% Invisible: The Giftschrank
Anime News Network: Manga Version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf Sells 45,000
