Kimberly Anderson
3 – Mein Kampf: Banned Best Seller
In 1924, while in prison for high treason, Hitler began writing what would later be considered one of the world’s most dangerous books. In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), which was initially published in two volumes (1925, 1927), Hitler chronicled his life and presented his racist ideology; he claimed to have become “a fanatical anti-Semite” while living in Vienna. Although it initially had only limited success, Mein Kampf’s popularity grew as did that of Hitler and the Nazis. A bible of National Socialism, it was required reading in Germany, and by 1939 more than five million copies had been sold. After Hitler’s death, the work was banned in Germany and other countries, and the German state of Bavaria, which held the copyright, refused to grant publishing rights. However, some foreign publishers continued to print the work, and in 2016 it entered the public domain after the copyright expired. Days later a heavily annotated Mein Kampf was published in Germany for the first time since 1945. It became a best seller.
