Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has earned its author an estimated $3,120,000 in royalties. Some $3,000,000 has come from Germany, where the volume is a "must" for every bookshelf, but there have also been respectable sales among Palestine Arabs, in Italy and Rebel Spain and small sales in Scandinavia, Britain, the U. S.
Adolf Hitler wrote his inflammatory testament in 1924-26, when he was an irresponsible rabble-rouser. When he became chief of State, Mein Kampf became something of a diplomatic embarrassment. Its many German editions have been somewhat toned down. Blasts against Italy for subjugating Austrians in the Italian Tyrol were eliminated when the Rome-Berlin axis was formed. More recently it was promised that blasts against France would be withdrawn.
Six years ago the U. S. had its first peek at the book in an abridged form which reduced the 781 original ranting pages to a more succinct 297. This version sold some 25,000 copies. Seriously impaired by condensation, however, was the original's most important feature—its faithful prophecy of Hitler's subsequent aggressive foreign policy.
The amazingly prophetic, frothy mouthed, full text of Mein Kampf has now become a historical curiosity as well as a psychopathic marvel, and last week, on the same day, two Manhattan publishing firms brought out the first unexpurgated U. S. translations of the Nazi Good Book. One firm (Reynal & Hitchcock) will presumably earn royalties for the Führer, the other (Stackpole), being printed in defiance of the Hitler copyright, will not. Excess profits from both will go to German refugee organizations.
Behind the two editions of Mein Kampf lay a publishing battle as hard-fought as many an early Hitler struggle. Having made scrupulous arrangements with the copyright holders, Reynal & Hitchcock applied for a temporary injunction against Stackpole, which claimed—among other things—that Hitler's Battle now belongs to the public domain. Last week a Federal judge in Manhattan denied the injunction. Both publishers meanwhile battled against time, with the result that both translations are hurried, occasionally inaccurate, always heavy and Germanic in idiom. The Stackpole version is somewhat easier reading, the Reynal & Hitchcock job has the advantage of being annotated. Arrows and daggers handily mark the sections expurgated from the English edition.
So many of the more significant paragraphs have been unofficially translated by correspondents and special writers that practically no surprises are left. Among the livelier, least truthful and lesser-known assertions, however, one about the U. S. is worth attention:*
"Jews are the regents of the stock exchange power of the American Union. Every year they manage to become increasingly the controlling masters of the labor power of a people of 120,000,000 souls. . . . With rapacious cleverness they knead public opinion and form from it the instrument of a struggle for their own future."
If, as some think, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are now almost ready to grasp each other's hands, the grasping will be done contrary to Mein Kampf's tenet: