Mein Kampf to be taught in Germany

BERLIN — Does Mein Kampf belong in German high schools?

With Adolf Hitler’s book due to come out of wraps here in 2015, after decades under copyright protection that prevented its publication in Germany, it’s a question that is being debated in classrooms and on German TV talk shows.

The discussion has not eased since the Ministry of Finance in Bavaria, which owns the rights, announced plans earlier this year to prepare annotated excerpts for German schools. Scholars at Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History are working on the official annotated edition of the approximately 900-page book. Critics say it’s better not to play with fire: some youth already have an unhealthy fascination with this chapter of history and don’t need further fuel.

But most observers agree that excerpts with expert commentary could help demystify the taboo tome.

Germany’s Jewish community has no problem with plans for the new edition. Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has said it makes sense to publish the book “to prevent neo-Nazis from profiting from it” and to “remove many of its false, persistent myths.”

The move “is absolutely right and overdue,” said Julian Barlen, co-founder of the anti-Nazi website Endstation Rechts and a Social Democrat legislator in the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Anyone who wants to read the book can download a copy anyway, he noted, and its ban “probably even raises the fascination with Hitler among some teens.”

Actually, it’s “a very boring book and no kid will like to read it,” said political scientist Thomas Lutz, who heads the memorial museums department of the Topography of Terror Foundation at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. “A special edition may be helpful as a further possibility to deal with the Nazi period, but I would not overestimate its impact.”

Hitler wrote his rant against Jews and communists while in prison in 1923 following his attempted coup in Munich. After he came to power in 1933, many editions were published, including one given free to newlywed couples and one to mark Hitler’s 50th birthday in 1939.

“The Nazis tried to put the book everywhere,” said historian Christian Hartmann of the Institute for Contemporary History, which is advising the state’s Agency for Civic Education on the educational excerpts.

Following World War II, the Bavarian Finance Ministry inherited the copyright from the publisher, and until now, it has barred publication in Germany in an effort to limit the spread of Hitler’s ideology. But that does not stop publication elsewhere.

“Of course, Hitler is a fascinosum,” an object of fascination, Hartmann said. “Evil is always fascinating, and you can’t prevent that.”

Accordingly, the book “is one of the most purchased in the world – more than 12 million copies have been sold. Here, where it was banned, people have read it secretly.

“What we are trying to do is demystify Mein Kampf and make it what it is: a historical source and nothing more,” Hartmann added.

Amid Hitler’s inaccurate accounts of personal and world history are hints of what would come, he said. “Such things as the Holocaust, the attack on the Soviet Union, relations with France and Italy, attempts to form a union with Great Britain – these are in the book. It is a kind of master plan for his later deeds.”

Documentary evidence of those deeds can be seen at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. On a glass-topped display table in a ground-floor room are facsimiles of the minutes of the meeting of Jan. 20, 1942, where the “Final Solution” was mapped out. Adolf Eichmann wrote the protocol.

On a recent visit, students from St. Ursula High School of Geisenheim viewed the pages intently.

 “In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east,” Eichmann wrote in one section. “Any first-degree mischling [person with one Jewish parent] to be exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to prevent any progeny… State Secretary Dr. Buhler… had only one favour to ask: that the Jewish question in this territory be resolved as fast as possible.”

People “could have known” what was coming if they read Mein Kampf, said teacher Annette Zschatzsch, looking at the display with her students.

“But people did not read it.”

As for whether it would be useful for students to read the book, David, 17, said he thought it would be good for students aged 16 and older to have access to explanations and a “watered-down version.”

Zschatzsch, who graduated high school in 1984, noted that she and her classmates also were able to read parts of Mein Kampf excerpted in textbooks, “but the degree to which it was used depended on the individual teacher.”