Copyright Confusion

It has been said of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Nazi imperialist bible, that in it Hitler wrote the history of Europe from 1933 to the indefinite future. Most observers agree that, Adolf Hitler being what he now is in the world, Mein Kampf is hot political dope. But for U. S. readers, two-thirds of Mein Kampf is a closed book. The only U. S. edition (Houghton Mifflin, published in 1933) was heavily expurgated, the suppressed sections referring to Hitler's designs on central and eastern Europe, South America, the democracies generally.

Last fortnight Stackpole Sons announced that they would publish in late February a completely unexpurgated U. S. edition. Simultaneously Publishers Houghton Mifflin and Reynal & Hitchcock announced that they had long been preparing an unexpurgated version, which they would publish jointly in late February. Translated and annotated by a group of refugee German scholars, it will run to about 1,000 pages; the first printing will be 250,000 copies.

At the same time Houghton Mifflin said that only their edition would be "fully and validly copyrighted in this country," that they would seek an injunction to prevent the sale of the Stackpole edition. Stackpole Sons declare that Hitler's U. S. copyright is illegal. Their basis for this claim is that Hitler's copyright for the first volume (1925) registers him as a Staaten-loser Deutscher (stateless German), and for the second volume (1927) as an Austrian. According to Stackpole's lawyer, Philip Wittenberg, U. S. copyright does not extend to a "stateless citizen" and Adolf Hitler was not then an Austrian citizen. Further arguing that Mein Kampf is in the public domain, Stackpole contends: 1) Nazi Germany is not the Germany with which the U. S. signed its copyright treaty of 1892; 2) the Nazi Government rules by decree, not law; 3) because they ban many a U. S. author, the Nazis violate the reciprocal conditions of the treaty.

Whatever happened, U. S. readers would soon get a look at the complete text. And German refugees would profit: both Houghton Mifflin and Stackpole announced that profits would be donated to refugee funds.

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