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Whether it's Cologne sex assaults or Mein Kampf, Germany still doesn't trust its people
The furore over the republication of Hitler's venomous ideas shows that this is still a country whose leaders aren't comfortable with the truth
ByNigel Jones :57pm
A copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf - A critical edition on display in a bookshop
For the first time in the seven decades since he died by his own hand in his bunker beneath blazing Berlin, Germans are again able this week to read the book-length racist rant that Adolf Hitler's called Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") in their own language. That is, if they can get hold of a copy.
For Hitler's turgid, rambling mix of autobiography, prophecy and political manifesto has come out of copyright, and a scholarly 2,000 page edition of a text that under the Third Reich was presented to every German couple on their wedding day has once again been published in Germany,
"The book is a virtually unreadable ragbag of personal reminiscence and a chilling forecast of Hitler's future plans for Germany."
Hitler dictated the book to his chauffeur Emil Maurice and his doglike disciple Rudolf Hess while banged up in the prison fortress of Landsberg in 1924 for his unsuccessful 1923 Beerhall Putsch in Munich. He wanted to call it "Four and a Half Years' Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice", but his publisher gently suggested the slightly snappier "My Struggle" might have more popular appeal.
The book is a virtually unreadable ragbag of personal reminiscence, anti-Semitic diatribes, self-pitying sentimentality, and a chilling forecast of Hitler's future plans for Germany after the Nazis came to power, including conquering France, battling Russian Bolshevism, enslaving the Slavs, and veiled hints of the Holocaust itself.
The publisher this time around is the heavyweight historical Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) based in Munich, capital of Bavaria, the south German city and state that was the cradle of the Nazi movement in the 1920s, and where Hitler spent his happiest hours.
The Bavarian state government, which inherited the publishing part of the former Fuhrer's estate, and is extremely sensitive about its most infamous one-time resident, had resolutely refused to republish while the seventy years copyright lasted. However it was unable to prevent publication of the toxic work after the copyright expired. Discretion about Nazism, in official Bavaria's eyes, was definitely the better part of valour.
Although some members of Germany's Jewish community - now 100,000 strong - expressed unease that the book's release would fuel a new wave of neo-Nazism, and despite the fact that the first edition sold out within hours on Germany's Amazon website, independent historians have backed the republication, and it seems unlikely that the heavily annotated and deliberately dull-looking tome will ever again attain bestseller status.
Historian Roger Moorhouse, author of His Struggle, an account of the writing of the original book, says the controversy is "much more about Germany's continued obsession with Hitler, and the curious assumption that his horrid, outdated ideas are still 'infectious', than...about the book itself."
There is, surely, also a coincidental link between official German efforts to stifle or filter Hitler's rancid tex and the same establishment's current ham-fisted attempt to cover up the true extent and the identity of the perpetrators of the mass sexual assaults on women in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany on New Year's Eve
It as if Germany's rulers do not trust their own people with the ability to handle uncomfortable truths. Whether those truths are the poisonous doctrines that once entranced the nation and led to the Holocaust and the devastation of Europe in the Second World War, or the more immediately dismaying reality that parts of German cities are no longer safe for German women to walk in because of their own government's policies, the instinct to suppress the truth remains the same. It is a profoundly unhealthy trait.
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