Our story begins at the bottom shelf of a glass display case in the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. There, an old, thick tome rests. The title on its black, yellow and white tattered cover is familiar: “Mein Kampf.” What is unusual is the rest of the cover.
It has “by Hitler,” instead of Adolf Hitler. Across the top reads “The Complete Unauthorized,” and across the bottom: “This Edition Pays No Royalty to Adolf Hitler.” It was printed in Harrisburg, and its controversial publication 73 years ago ended in a minor landmark U.S. court decision.
The book was published in 1939 by Harrisburg’s Stackpole Sons, part of a local trade publishing company that included Military Service Publishing Co. It was owned by E.J. Stackpole Jr., a highly decorated World War I army officer whose father, E.J. Sr., had owned Harrisburg’s Evening Telegraph.
E.J. Jr. first acquired Military Service Publishing in 1930 from National Service Publishing Co. in Washington, D.C. In 1936, he and his brother, Albert, started Stackpole Sons, located at Cameron and Kelker streets. Today, the company’s name is Stackpole Books, operating in Mechanicsburg.
The title – “The Complete Unauthorized Mein Kampf” – sounds as if it was meant to taunt the German dictator, but E.J. Jr’s, grandson and current head of Stackpole Books, David Detweiler, said it was a warning about Hitler and his ideology.
“It was a warning to the nation, a warning to the president, a warning to the people,” Detweiler said.
By the late ‘30s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had concluded that America would eventually have to go to war against Hitler, but the mood of the nation was isolationist, against sending troops to fight in Europe.
Several years earlier, in 1933, New York publishing house Houghton Mifflin published an abridged version of “Mein Kampf,” titling it “My Battle,” that many critics publically decried as making the Nazi ideology sound almost benign.
By 1939, with Hitler having trampled treaties and occupied two countries, and with war closing in on Europe, Houghton Mifflin decided to publish “Mein Kampf” unabridged, but so did Stackpole Sons.
“Until last March, U. S. readers had never seen an unexpurgated, full-length translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” reported Time Magazine in November ’39. “Then, simultaneously, two U. S. editions appeared.”
For a bibliophile who travels the globe to collect books for Midtown Scholar’s massive collection, store owner Eric Papenfuse wonders whether Stackpole had wittingly or unwittingly acted on the U.S. government’s behalf in publishing “Mein Kampf.”
Detweiler chuckles at the notion, noting his grandfather was a conservative Republican who disliked FDR immensely. “I can tell you categorically he had no interest in helping Franklin Roosevelt.”
As a publisher who launched his Midtown Scholar Press last year, Papenfuse finds it interesting that Stackpole had received a manuscript already translated from the German. “Where did they get their translation?” he said.
Papefuse suggests it came from the American intelligence community. Perhaps they wanted to be sure an unabridged version of “Mein Kampf” was available to the public so Americans would understand why it was necessary to go to war against Hitler.
“The government may have used them to do this,” said Papenfuse, noting Stackpole had federal contracts – and still does today – to publish military manuals.
Detweiler dismissed that theory. He said Stackpole had a New York office and the translation came from a city book agent. Is it possible the government gave the agent the manuscript in order to find an unwitting publisher?
“That’s always possible,” Detweiler said. “I could believe that.”
It was on the advice of newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who Hitler had kicked out of Germany in 1934 because he didn’t like her reporting, that Stackpole decided to publish an unabridged version of “Mein Kampf,” Detweiler said.
When Stackpole released its edition, Houghton Mifflin, which held the U.S. copyright, sued Stackpole Sons in federal court. Stackpole argued Hitler’s copyright was illegal because at the time Hitler, an Austrian by birth, published the book in 1925, he had declared himself “stateless.”
According to Time, Stackpole’s lawyer, Philip Wittenberg, argued several points including that U. S. copyright law does not extend to a “stateless citizen,” that “Mein Kampf” is in the public domain, and that Nazi Germany is not the Germany with which the U. S. signed its copyright treaty of 1892.
Writing about the controversy for The New Yorker in March 1939, E.B. White called out Stackpole for refusing to pay the dictator his royalties: “From now on Hitler is going to think of us with new fury, as a bunch of highbinders who are doing him out of 30 cents on every book.”
Stackpole lost its case. It only sold 12,000 copies in the three months its “Mein Kampf” edition was available. Remaining copies were destroyed. The case is considered a minor landmark in U.S. copyright law. The court ruled stateless persons have status.
Hitler would never see royalties from either Stackpole or Houghton Mifflin because the legal wrangling did not end until late 1941, just before America entered the war against Germany, Italy and Japan.
