Polish Man Sentenced For Publishing Mein Kampf

Polish Man Sentenced For Publishing Mein Kampf


On Monday a Polish man from the city of Wroclaw was sentenced to a three-month suspended sentence by a Polish court for copyright infringement because he published Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925). The Polish man, known in court documents as Marek S due to Polish privacy laws, was also fined the equivalent of about $3000 US dollars. Copyright of the key Nazi ideological work belongs to the German state of Bavaria. Yet, the book is banned in Bavaria and Germany.

In 2005, Marek S actually published 20,000 copies of Mein Kampf. Should he publish more copies in the next two years, the Polish man will need to serve his prison sentence. The Bavarian and German governments are keen to prevent the spread of Mein Kampf because it can become a neat recruiting vehicle for extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist, and neo-Nazi political movements.

Mein Kampf is no doubt one of the toxic books in human history. Its call for the extermination of Jews, Slavs, liberalism, socialism, communism, social democracy, and parliamentarism are indeed chilling. Its desire for expansionism towards the "sub-human" Slavic East makes a mockery of the principle of the right of self-determination of nations.

Yet, Mein Kampf presents a problem for a scholar of fascism and Nazism like myself. On the one hand, for historical reasons, I understand the position of the German state vis-a-vis the banning of the Hitlerian text.

On the other hand, Mein Kampf, as well as the works of other racialists both yesterday and today, are indispensable tools for understanding one of the most significant and chilling political movements of the 20th century. In the age of the Internet and global communications, it becomes increasingly difficult to prevent individuals from getting a hold of Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial materials, or other literary forms of annihilationist racial hatred such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They are all freely available on many Internet sites. Banning breeds suspicion and an underground following. It creates free speech martyrs out of people that do not care much about free speech. Court testimony revealed that Marek S was interested neither in historical scholarship, nor free speech, but merely in making more Polish zlotys!

Tamir Bar-On