But it is widely agreed that this judge let him go way too far. Judge Neithardt later claimed he couldn’t interrupt Hitler because of the flood of words, but that’s a pretty lame excuse.
Even though Hitler was being tried for treason, you write that the most shocking moment of the trial was not anything he said about overthrowing the government but rather his accusation that General Otto von Lossow broke his word of honor. Even Judge Neithardt called it “an impropriety without precedent.” Why was this such a big deal?
In Germany at the time, one’s word of honor was taken very, very seriously, and breaking one’s word of honor was essentially the highest possible offence you could commit, especially in military culture. So when Hitler accused Lossow of that it was – you’re right – the most dramatic single moment in the trial. Lossow stared at Hitler, grabbed his stuff, bowed to the judge, and walked out – never to return. So even though in the moment it appeared that Hitler had committed a horrible offence, he got away with it.
Is one’s word of honor still considered a big deal in German culture today?
No. Germany is of course a somewhat more formal and courtly culture than ours, but at the same it’s a very modern, youthful culture, and nobody talks about one’s word of honor any more than we do here.
The copyright for Mein Kampf – held by the Bavarian government since World War II – expired on January 1, 2016. In preparation for that date, Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History, with funding from the government, prepared a critical edition of Mein Kampf with extensive footnotes. You argued in an op-ed for The New York Times last year that this publication should be welcomed. Why?
For educational purposes. Mein Kampf is a central document to the study of Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust, and you can’t really claim to know much if you haven’t read it.
At the same time, though, a whole mythology has built up around Mein Kampf, partly because it was out of reach, especially to Germans, since World War II. They could find it on the Internet or if they dug around in the back of some used bookstore, but it was not out in public to see or examine.
Furthermore, what the Institute for Contemporary History did was produce a commentated edition with footnotes and annotations that are about 1,200 pages long. Hitler’s text itself is about 800 pages long. So there are one and a half times as many footnotes as there are words by Hitler, and it is very hard to read as a [regular book]. You’re interrupted constantly by these footnotes, and they’re fascinating to read because they give you background and context. They tell you where Hitler was lying or telling a half-truth and they cross index each other because Hitler was repetitious and confusing. So it’s very useful.
I should add, incidentally, that the new critical edition of Mein Kampf has been compared to a Talmud since Hitler’s text is in the middle surrounded by the footnotes. Dan Michman, the head of international research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, drew this to my attention.
This critical edition is the only modern version of Mein Kampf currently available in Germany. With the copyright now expired, though, can’t any publisher print the original version without footnotes?
They can, but I was talking with a very knowledgeable person in Germany recently and he doubts any commercial publisher will jump on this because the critical edition kind of sucks all the air out of the room and the market for an edition [without comments] would probably be fairly small.
