Germany Will Reprint Hitler’s Mein Kampf

Annotated Edition to Reject Racist Assertions

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff
Newser.com, Posted Feb 25, 2015 1:32 PM CST
http://www.newser.com/story/203197/germany-will-reprint-hitlers-mein-kampf.html
(Newser) – Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which the Washington Post describes as a “kind of Nazi bible,” has long been hidden away in Germany; the state of Bavaria, holder of the rights to the book, has prevented it from being republished since the end of World War II. But at the end of this year, the state loses those rights, and a new edition of the racist volume will soon arrive, the Post reports. It will be annotated and presented as an academic work rather than a guidebook to hate; some 4,000 notations will expand a 700-page book into a 2,000-page one stretching across two volumes, the New York Times reports. The annotations will reject Hitler’s racist arguments, but that hasn’t prevented deep concern.
“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” says a library historian, while an advocate against anti-Semitism wonders: “Can you annotate the Devil?” Further complicating the issue, the new edition is being published by a historical society financed by taxpayers, the Post notes; the society doesn’t want the book to become a commercial publication, the Times reports. A sample sentence describes Jews as “the eternal parasite, a freeloader that, like a malignant bacterium, spreads rapidly whenever a fertile breeding ground is made available to it.” A Jewish leader in Munich worries that the book “is a Pandora’s box that, once opened again, cannot be closed.” Such fears are particularly pronounced at a time when anti-Semitism in Europe is once again rearing its head; last week saw hundreds of Jewish graves defiled in France.

Annotated Version of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ to Be Published Next Year

By Melissa Eddy
The New York Times, Feb. 24, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/world/europe/hitler-annotated-mein-kampf-planned.html

BERLIN — Researchers are on track to finish roughly 4,000 annotations and historical notes to accompany a new German-language edition of Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” to be published in January 2016, after the existing copyright expires.

A noted center for the study of Nazism, The Institute for Contemporary History, in Munich, has been working on the edition for several years. The copyright held by the German state of Bavaria expires at the end of 2015.

Simone Paulmichl, a spokeswoman for the institute, said Tuesday that the addition of the critical commentary was expected to more than double the length of the original, which was more than 700 pages, to about 2,000 pages to be published in two volumes. The institute plans to put out the annotated version itself, to prevent it from being published as a commercial endeavor.

Last summer, the justice ministers of Germany’s 16 states agreed that the book should not be published in Germany without accompanying commentary.

Although they made no specific comment regarding how an annotated version, with comments that are clearly distanced from the premises of the work, would be handled, the institute remains confident that its version will be able to proceed, Ms. Paulmichl said.

Although “Mein Kampf” is available online, and printed copies can be purchased at bookstores and flea markets in the neighboring Czech Republic or Hungary [N. B.!], the state of Bavaria has refused to allow its republication in Germany. Critics charge that the prohibition has only increased interest in the book in some quarters.

‘Mein Kampf’: A historical tool, or Hitler’s voice from beyond the grave?
By Anthony Faiola 
The Washington Post, February 24, 2015
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/mein-kampf-a-historical-tool-or-hitlers-voice-from-beyond-the-grave/2015/02/24/f7a3110e-b950-11e4-bc30-a4e75503948a_story.html
MUNICH — Old copies of the offending tome are kept in a secure “poison cabinet,” a literary danger zone in the dark recesses of the vast Bavarian State Library. A team of experts vets every request to see one, keeping the toxic text away from the prying eyes of the idly curious or those who might seek to exalt it.
“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp warned as he carefully laid a first edition of “Mein Kampf” — Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto of hate — on a table in a restricted reading room.
Nevertheless, the book that once served as a kind of Nazi bible, banned from domestic reprints since the end of World War II, will soon be returning to German bookstores from the Alps to the Baltic Sea.
The prohibition on reissue for years was upheld by the state of Bavaria, which owns the German copyright and legally blocked attempts to duplicate it. But those rights expire in December, and the first new print run here since Hitler’s death is due out early next year. The new edition is a heavily annotated volume in its original German that is stirring an impassioned debate over history, anti-Semitism and the latent power of the written word.
The book’s reissue, to the chagrin of critics, is effectively being financed by German taxpayers, who fund the historical society that is producing and publishing the new edition. Rather than a how-to guidebook for the aspiring fascist, the new reprint, the group said this month, will instead be a vital academic tool, a 2,000-page volume packed with more criticisms and analysis than the original text.
Still, opponents are aghast, in part because the book is coming out at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and as the English and other foreign-language versions of “Mein Kampf” — unhindered by the German copyrights — are in the midst of a global renaissance.
Although authorities here struck deals with online sellers such as Amazon.com to prohibit sales in Germany, new copies of “Mein Kampf” have become widely available via the Internet around the globe. In retail stores in India, it is enjoying strong popularity as a self-help book for Hindu nationalists. A comic-book edition was issued in Japan. A new generation of aficionados is also rising among the surging ranks of the far right in Europe. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece, for instance, has stocked “Mein Kampf” at its bookstore in Athens.

Regardless of the academic context provided by the new volume, critics say the new German edition will ultimately allow Hitler’s voice to rise from beyond the grave.

“I am absolutely against the publication of ‘Mein Kampf,’ even with annotations. Can you annotate the Devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler?” said Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Berlin-based Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism. “This book is outside of human logic.”
Not surprisingly, the new edition has become a political hot potato, illustrating the always-awkward question of how modern Germany should deal with its past. Initially, Bavaria, for instance, had pledged $575,000 to directly support publication of the new edition for historical purposes. But it backed out after the Bavarian governor’s 2012 visit to Israel, where he heard withering criticism of the proposal from Holocaust survivors.
That left the state-funded organization putting out the new edition — the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History — in a bind. Since the late 1940s, the institute has analyzed the rise and aftermath of the Nazi era, putting out annotated texts such as Hitler’s speeches. The single most important work it has not yet published in annotated form is, in fact, “Mein Kampf.”  Since 2012, it has had a team of academics laboring on the new edition in preparation for the copyright’s expiry.
Despite the chorus of opposition, particularly from Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors, the institute has opted to go ahead with publication, funding it from its general budget — a task made easier by the fact that Bavaria allowed it to keep the original grant for other research purposes.
“I understand some immediately feel uncomfortable when a book that played such a dramatic role is made available again to the public,” said Magnus Brechtken, the institute’s deputy director. “On the other hand, I think that this is also a useful way of communicating historical education and enlightenment — a publication with the appropriate comments, exactly to prevent these traumatic events from ever happening again.”
A rambling, repetitive work panned by literary critics for its pedantic style, “Mein Kampf” was drafted by Hitler in a Bavarian jail after the failed Nazi uprising in Munich in November 1923. It was initially published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, with later, joint editions forming a kind of Nazi handbook. During the Third Reich, some German cities doled out copies to Aryan newlyweds as wedding gifts.
The book also laid the groundwork for the Holocaust, stating, for instance, that Jews are and “will remain the eternal parasite, a freeloader that, like a malignant bacterium, spreads rapidly whenever a fertile breeding ground is made available to it.”
Contrary to popular belief, “Mein Kampf” — or “My Struggle” — was never banned in postwar Germany; only its reprinting was. Of the more than 12.4 million copies in existence before 1945, hundreds of thousands are thought to survive. Old copies can still be sold in antiquarian bookstores. But public access is generally confined to a few restricted repositories such as the library here in Munich, which only permits viewings based on academic need or historical research. Bavarian authorities also have played cat-and-mouse with those who have sought to publish “Mein Kampf” online, acting to block German-language versions posted on the Internet whenever possible.
Brechtken said the new print version will point out, for instance, how Hitler appeared to borrow his views from other sources, and it will refute his racist claims. Bavarian officials also say they will seek to apply incitement-to-hate laws to any attempt to publish unannotated versions in the future. But so far, they say they will not seek to block publication of the institute’s expanded version, citing the benefits it may bring to historical research. 
Yet vocal opposition appears to be growing. Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community in Munich, said she had not vigorously opposed it when the project first surfaced. But her position, she said, hardened after hearing from outraged Holocaust survivors.
“This book is most evil; it is the worst anti-Semitic pamphlet and a guidebook for the Holocaust,” she said. “It is a Pandora’s box that, once opened again, cannot be closed.”
Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin contributed to this report.
 
Germany is housing refugees within Holocaust-era concentration camps
By Rick Noack 
The Washington Post, January 30, 2015
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/01/30/germany-is-housing-refugees-within-holocaust-era-concentration-camps/
On Tuesday, the world remembered the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The same day, the German city of Augsburg decided to turn a branch of the former concentration camp at Dachau into a refugee center. The asylum seekers were slated to live in a building where thousands of slave laborers suffered and died under the Nazi regime.
The Dachau outpost is not the only concentration camp site that is being turned into a refugee center in Germany.
In the middle of January, the German city of Schwerte started to move asylum-seekers who had volunteered to be relocated into a branch of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald.
Regional integration secretary Guntram Schneider had previously criticized the plan, saying that the city’s intentions would be misunderstood abroad.
Birgit Naujoks,  a representative of a local council of asylum-seekers, voiced similar skepticism about such projects, speaking to The Washington Post on Friday: “Generally, the use of former concentration camp compounds as refugee centers awakens associations with the site’s Nazi-era [use], where people were forcefully herded together,” she said.
She added, however, that the refugees living at the former concentration camp compound in Schwerte were so far happy with their accommodations, despite its history. “They say that they have much more space there compared to the building they had previously lived in,” Naujoks said.
Schwerte’s mayor had pursued his plans despite the criticism. At a news conference this month, he defended the plan to house the refugees at the prison camp site. According to him, there were no short-term alternatives, given the growing influx of asylum-seekers into Germany. He added that refugees were being accommodated in a house built after World War II on the grounds of the site, rather than a former concentration camp barracks. The building in question was also used as a refugee center nearly two decades ago.
In Augsburg, city officials are trying to emphasize their good intentions. “One cannot only commemorate [at this memorial site], one also has to act,” city official Stefan Kiefer told local newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine, referring to the pressing need to find housing for refugees. According to the paper, local politicians welcomed the proposal, saying that turning the former barracks into a refugee center would make it a “better memorial site than a museum would be.”
Antje Seubert, a representative of the Green party, celebrated the decision as a “victory over fascism.”
To understand why the accommodation of asylum-seekers on former concentration camp sites is celebrated as a victory in Germany, one has to take a deeper look at the country’s current struggle to deal with a growing influx of refugees.
In 2013 and 2014, more asylum claims were submitted in Germany than in any other country, leading to a shortage of available housing to accommodate the refugees.
To absorb the growing number of asylum seekers, city representatives have turned to such unusual alternatives as empty warehouses, military barracks and tents. Officials have also had to deal with protests by locals opposed to the mass accommodation.
In recent weeks, the anti-Muslim Pegida movement has gained support, particularly in eastern Germany. Among the movement’s goals is the creation of a new immigration law that would make it more difficult for refugees to come to Germany and easier to deport asylum-seekers.
Most national German politicians are opposed to Pegida’s goals, and momentum for pro-tolerance marches and protests has grown in recent weeks. Local politicians and city officials, however, are increasingly concerned about the lack of housing and support for new asylum-seekers. In 2014, German refugee centers were attacked about 150 times, presumably by right-wing extremists, according to a recent report by the Amadeu Antonio foundation.
Given such worrisome trends, some consider the current debate about the accommodation of refugees on former concentration camp sites as overblown and a distraction from more pressing concerns.
On Thursday, German newspaper Handelsblatt commented that the real, underlying problem was far worse than the accommodation of refugees in former death camps: “The use of decaying buildings, containers or even tents as refugee centers does neither enable people to live in dignity, nor will it promote assimilation.”
Hitler’s vacation paradise is reinvented as condos, hotels, spa
By Anthony Faiola 
The Washington Post, December 15, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/hitlers-vacation-paradise-is-reinvented-as-condos-hotels-spa/2014/12/15/acb73eac-79b5-11e4-8241-8cc0a3670239_story.html
Prora, Germany — Built by the Third Reich in the run-up to World War II, the Strength Through Joy resort was a Nazi vision of tourism’s future. Happy, healthy Aryans would stay and play at the 10,000-room complex on the Baltic Sea, eating, swimming and even bowling for the Führer. Think Hitler’s Cancun.
But 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the complex nicknamed the Colossus of Prora is part of a growing debate in modern Germany that pits commercialism against Vergangenheitsbewältigung — or the German word for how the country should come to terms with its dark past.
Identical blocks of six-story buildings stretching for 2.8 miles went up before World War II slowed construction, leaving an unfinished hulk that was later retrofitted into training grounds and housing for East German soldiers. But a group of investors in this seaside town is now doing what the Nazis never could: realizing the site’s final stage of transformation into a vacation wonderland. Large parts of the complex are being gutted and rebuilt into developments, including one called “New Prora” that will house luxury beachfront condominiums — half of which have been sold — as well as an upscale hotel and spa.

It’s not just the cashing in on a major Nazi landmark that troubles opponents. In a sense, some argue, the renovation also is fulfilling the Third Reich’s initial plan to turn the colossus into a massive tourism hub. In promotional material, developers are hailing the original project [N. B.!] — whose design is believed to have been chosen by Adolf Hitler — as a “world-famous monument” recognized in its day for “award-winning architecture.” Nevertheless, critics say, their plans also may wash away many of the elements that provided the reason for preserving the colossus in the first place.

“These are not harmless buildings,” said Jürgen Rostock, co-founder for the Prora documentation center. “The original purpose for Hitler was the construction of [a resort] in preparation for the war to come. This way of dealing with the building trivializes it and affirms the Nazi regime.” [N. B.!]  
The facades of some blocks, for instance, are being brightened by dozens of quaint sea-facing balconies, changing the nature of the imposing, austere architecture that stood as a monument to insatiable militarism. In addition, the one documentation center at the site explaining the Big Brotheresque Strength Through Joy program — a Nazi effort to provide affordable fun to workers living the National Socialist dream — may be moved to the fringes of the complex and away from moneyed vacationers or, some fear, abandoned altogether.
Without doubt, recriminations of the Third Reich are far and wide in modern Germany, with war-era crime history taught from elementary school onward and a pacifist national identity built largely on a rejection of the past. But the Prora project is highlighting the ­always-thorny question here of how to deal with the most tangible relic of Germany’s troubled past: Nazi architecture.
In the years after the war, some Nazi-era structures were preserved as monumental testaments to an inhuman regime, while others were pragmatically transformed into offices, army barracks and spaces for other uses. The Berlin stadium built for Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games is now home to the Hertha Berlin soccer club. The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus — former home of Hermann Göring’s Ministry of Aviation — now houses a branch of Germany’s Finance Ministry.
Yet opponents in some circles — particularly historians and Jewish groups — are growing increasingly uncomfortable with projects that smack too much of commercialization or appear to slight history. In Berlin, for instance, a lavish mall opened in September on the site of the former Wertheim department store, a Jewish-owned business whose original owners were dispossessed by the Nazis.
“The site has been redeveloped with abundant references to the glorious days of the department store’s best years but without any display that references the fact that the original owners were forced to relinquish ownership and flee,” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office.

In the mountainous Eifel region of western Germany, meanwhile, a former Nazi training ground is undergoing a $52 million facelift, adding a convention center and observation deck. The facility’s Web site suggests a blend of historical remembrance and eco-tourism, bluntly stating, “We don’t consider leisure activities and taking a critical look at the history to be irreconcilable.”

After the preservation of so many former Nazi buildings, some also are arguing that enough is enough, saying the time has come to let them waste away or, in some instances, consider tearing them down. Skeptical historians, for instance, are questioning plans in Nuremberg to spend $100 million on the renovation of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, where Hitler proudly watched marches of his goose-stepping hordes.
“My argument, and the argument of quite a few architectural historians, is: Why renovate such a monument?” said Norbert Frei, a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. “One could also give it to a controlled decay. Leave it as is, and allow what will happen to it to happen. It’s in such bad shape that you have to do rather a lot to it. It’s almost like building it anew.”
Enter the Colossus of Prora.
The project was masterminded in the 1930s by Robert Ley, a top Hitler lieutenant. He led the Strength Through Joy effort, which was meant to be a cornerstone of the resort here.