The IP Factor

German police have confiscated 280 copies of a publication of Nazi newspapers reprinted by a British company Albertas.
The German Authorities have announced that they will sue the publishing house for printing and disseminating Nazi symbols such as the swastika, which is a criminal offence in Germany.
The publishers will also be charged with breach of copyright laws, as the German government claims copyright over the Nazi-era newspapers.

The controversy relates to Zeitungszeugen or Newspaper Witnesses, a new weekly publication that reprints copies of original newspapers from the Nazi period.

Supported by some German historians, the project, which claims to examine the history of the country’s media, was launched a fortnight ago.
A spokesman for the Bavarian government alleges that republishing Nazi newspapers meant confronting Holocaust survivors with their suffering and it also posed a danger of disseminating National Socialist propaganda.

The publication has become an instant bestseller across the country. However, it remains unclear whether the German public, most of which were born after the Nazi era, are motivated by a desire to study history or to bask in the glory of their darkest hour.

The CEO of the republishers, Peter McGee, claims that the project was conceived solely for educational purposes and would only serve to introduce historic truth to readers rather than to promote Nazism.

The decision to confiscate remaining issues and take the publishers to court comes after the state of Bavaria announced last week that it had sole copyright of the Nazi papers issued between 1933 and 1945.

The British publishing project has divided the German public. Charlotte Knoblauch, the head of the country’s Central Jewish Council, has condemned the publication.

Is it surprising that the republication is a British initiative? Not to me unfortunately. I have a serialized edition on Mein Kampf that was published by the British Red Cross in the 1930s. The UK has institutional antisemitism, often disguised as Anti Zionism, that is aided and abetted by self-hating Jews such as Gerald Kauffman who had the gall to compare Israel’s actions in Gaza with the German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.