ANSON RABINBACH
On
October 29, 1945, the Allied Control Council in Germany issued a decree
dissolving the organizations of the National Socialist Party including
its leading press agency and publishing house, the Franz Eher Nachfolger
GmbH. Since the headquarters of the firm was in Munich, the property of
the Eher Verlag was transferred to the Free State of Bavaria, which
also assumed legal succession and trusteeship of its assets. A
provisional court in Munich (Spruchkammer) initiated criminal
proceedings against Max Amann, who had amassed a considerable fortune as
the head of Nazi Germany’s largest publishing enterprise, sentencing
him to ten years imprisonment. In 1948, all copyrights were transferred
to the Bavarian State Ministry of Finance, including the copyright to Mein Kampf,
which belonged to the literary estate of Adolf Hitler. Since German
copyright law stipulates that all rights revert to the public domain
seventy years after the death of the author, the copyright to Mein Kampf expired on December 31, 2015. Mein Kampf
was never actually banned in the Federal Republic of Germany; it was
sold in second-hand bookshops, was obtainable in libraries, and in
recent years has been readily available on the internet. Only the
publication of the book was proscribed.
