Lary Bloom
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Hitler's Publisher
We dropped by on Saturday night at Robert and Cathy Miller's open house in Manhattan. Cathy is a teacher at a private school (and, from the evidence, a wonderful cook), and Robert, a congenial host, is the owner of Enigma Books, a publishing house that features World War II histories.Robert is formal fellow who always wears a tie, and did so on Saturday, though the male guests were the turtle-neck crowd. He is a congenial man, and he smiles when I refer to him as "Hitler's publisher." It is at once attention-getting and also true.
A few years ago, he convinced the Finance Ministry of Bavaria, which holds the rights to Hitler's sequel to Mein Kampf, to allow him to publish the book in North America. The ministry has been understandably reluctant to have this diatribe published anywhere, but nevertheless has permitted a limited array of houses around the world to do so. And so Robert, working with Gerhard L. Weinberg, emeritus professor of history at the University of North Carolina who discovered and translated the manuscript, published in 2003 what he titled Hitler's Second Book (a title the Bavarian Ministry of Finance despises).
The History Channel has already made a documentary about how it was discovered and why Hitler didn't want it published until after the war. The author got his wish, but not in the circumstances he perceived. The manuscript contains specific war plans against Britain and the United States, which is why he locked it in a vault for safekeeping.
The book sells reasonably in the United States, mostly in academia and to libraries. It is not in great demand by troublemakers. But in other countries, like Turkey, it is employed by some to justify the Holocaust, or to kindle new fires of hatred.
From time to time, I have dipped into the book, and have found it largely unreadable. It is written in the same style as Mein Kampf (and, unlike The Hitler Diaries has never been thought of as a forgery). It does show a demented mind at work - diatribe after diatribe about how the German people had been cheated of this or that.
In all, a valuable but demonic document. And, ironically, published by a man whose father was Jewish. (The last thing Hitler would have wanted, but to Hell with him.)
You may wonder who gets the royalties. Not a penny goes to the Hitler estate, such as it is. This also true for Mein Kampf. The North American rights to that have been held for decades by Houghton-Mifflin, and the book has produced a good deal of revenue. But soon those rights will expire, and anyone will be able to publish it.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:15 AM
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