The most dangerous book in the world?

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: TIMES PAST - "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler

The copyright of Mein Kampf just expired, allowing Adolf Hitler's hate-filled manifesto to be published in Germany for the first time in 70 years. Is that a good thing?

It's perhaps the world's most despised book--a mishmash of ideological manifesto, autobiography, and crackpot delusions by one of history's most notorious mass murderers, Adolf Hitler.

Mein Kampf, German for "my struggle," was written by Hitler when he was in his mid-30s and serving jail time for high treason against Germany. The book helped popularize his ideas about expanding Germany far beyond its borders as well as his vitriolic anti-Semitic views, which foreshadowed his campaign some 15 years later to exterminate the Jewish people (see Timeline, p. 20).

Publishing the book in Germany has been illegal for 70 years because Bavaria, a German state that assumed the copyright after Hitler's death in 1945, feared it might inspire others to adopt Hitler's hateful ideas. But that copyright expired on Dec. 31, 2015, allowing any publisher in Germany and those in many other countries to reprint the full work, with or without proper historical context. That's concerning to some people.

"The fact that the book is readily available gives it a certain credibility and legitimacy and makes it acceptable to have the book lying around on your living room table and saying, 'This is what I believe,"' says Menachem Rosensaft, a son of Holocaust survivors who teaches courses on genocide law at the law schools of Columbia University and Cornell University in New York. "It serves to make Hitler acceptable in polite society."

'People of the Same Blood*

The Austrian-born Hitler, a failed painter but mesmerizing speaker, was a radical figure on the fringes of German politics when he completed the two volumes of Mein Kampf in 1925 and 1926. He wrote most of it in a Bavarian prison, where he was serving time for leading fellow nationalists in what's known as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup against the state government. He aspired to seize power throughout Germany, and in 1933 he succeeded in becoming Germany's chancellor, though not through a coup: German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the post in hopes of gaining the support of his Nazi Party.

Hitler opens the book with a wish that he was to realize as Germany's dictator--the reunification of German-speaking Austria with Germany into a "great German Motherland."

"People of the same blood should be in the same Reich [empire]," he asserts. He also argued that Germans needed enough land to flourish, an expansionist vision that would lead to World War II (1939-45), with the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and later conquests of most of Europe, including a large swath of the Soviet Union.

Hitler's manifesto also hinted at another infernal plan. Though Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population, Hitler blamed them for Germany's loss in the First World War (1914-18) and its depressed economy. He wrote of his desire to foster a pure "master race" of "Aryans"--a misuse of an anthropological term for a category of whites. He wanted Aryans to be uncorrupted by Jews or other "inferior" groups like the Roma (known at the time as Gypsies) and the disabled. Had Jewish "corrupters of the nation ... been subjected to poison gas," he wrote, the deaths of millions of Germans in the First World War wouldn't have been in vain.

Those early ideas from a paranoid sociopath led, once Hitler became Germany's dictator, to laws that barred Jews from public schools, professions, even park benches. They also led to violent pogroms like Kristallnacht in November 1938 and ultimately the Holocaust. The 6 million Jews killed across Europe represented more than one-third of the world's Jewish population. Had countries like the U.S. opened their doors more widely to Jewish refugees, many of the victims would have been saved.

10 Million Copies Sold

MeinKampf didn't achieve popularity until Hitler's Nazi Party became a significant force in German politics, but then it took off, making Hitler a millionaire. Free copies were handed out to newly married couples and to soldiers. By the end of the war in 1945 (and Hitler's suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin as the U.S. and its allies approached), 10 million copies had been sold in more than a dozen languages, though many were buried in backyards by Germans not wanting Allied soldiers to discover they were Nazis.

During their occupation of Germany after the war, the Allies banned the book. Germany itself, as well as several other countries in Europe, went on to ban a host of Nazi symbols, including the flag, the swastika, military insignia, the Nazi salute, and speech inciting hatred toward any ethnic group. (In the U.S., the First Amendment right to freedom of speech is almost absolute, permitting hateful speech and symbols in many instances.)

The state of Bavaria assumed the book's copyright after confiscating Hitler's assets, but it chose not to exercise it for publication in Germany for the next 70 years. Yet the early editions have been available in used bookstores in Germany and online. In the U.S., Houghton Mifflin secured rights to an abridged English edition in 1935 and later published more-complete versions...