Copyright of Hitler’s Mein Kampf expires in Germany

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is to be available for purchase in Germany for the first time in 70 years.

Reprinting the anti-Semitic book was banned after World War II by Bavaria’s regional government, which held the copyright. However, the copyright has now expired and Munich’s Institute of Contemporary History will reprint the book and sell it in bookstores for €59 a copy, starting from next week.

However, the institute said that the book will not be reprinted in its original form but will instead be heavily annotated to expose its “lies, half-truths and vicious tirades”.

New versions are expected in many countries. Historians say the book helps academics understand what happened in the Nazi era.

Many Jewish groups have welcomed this particular annotated publication, saying it is important to have access to a critical edition to help explain the Holocaust, the BBC reported.

Mein Kampf was originally printed in 1925 - eight years before Hitler came to power.

After Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, the Allied forces handed the copyright to the book to the state of Bavaria.

The local authorities have refused to allow the book to be reprinted to prevent incitement of hatred, although the book was so widely printed during the war that it remained relatively easily available.

Under European copyright law, the rights of an author of a literary or artistic work runs for the life of the author and for 70 years after his death - in Hitler's case on 30 April 1945, when he shot himself in his bunker in Berlin.

Those rights cease on the first day of January 70 years after the author's death, and so publishers now have free access to the original text.

However, German officials have said they will limit public access to the text amid fears that this could stir neo-Nazi sentiment.