German publisher backs down on publishing Hitler extracts

Jan 25, 2012, 11:54 GMT

Munich - A history-magazine publisher who planned to publish extracts from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in Germany this week backed down Wednesday in the face of government pressure.

Germany has banned publication of Mein Kampf, a key Nazi tract, since 1945.

Peter McGee said the extracts would be greyed out, and only an accompanying criticism of Hitler's words would be legible when the weekly magazine Zeitungszeugen goes on sale Thursday.

The German-language magazine, which describes historic events along with cuttings from contemporary newspapers, aimed to ridicule Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribe, which claimed Jews were to blame for Germany's ills. Parts of Mein Kampf were to appear.

McGee said banning Mein Kampf had led to a 'bizarre' mystification among younger Germans of Hitler's 'revolting' text.

He said he could not afford a legal battle with the state of Bavaria, which had announced it would seek a court injunction to stop the upcoming three issues of the magazine on grounds of a breach of Hitler's copyright.

McGee said the Hitler text would be covered with a grey haze making it illegible in the issue to go on sale this week.

He told dpa he wanted to ensure that the row over the extracts did not imperil the magazine itself.

McGee said the magazine's image had suffered from a previous dispute with Bavaria when it re-published pages from a Nazi newspaper of the 1930s. McGee's company Albertas Ltd won a later court battle over that, because the newspaper was out of copyright.

Writings by Hitler remain in copyright in Germany until 2015, 70 years after the dictator's suicide.

Charlotte Knobloch, a former national leader of German Jews, attacked the magazine this week, saying the 'profit motive' was behind the bid to re-publish Hitler's words.

Read more about Holocaust