On last week's show we spoke to German media professor Nikolaus Peifer about Hitler's Mein Kampf entering the public domain. Listener Chuck Strinz wrote in to tell us a story about how in 1939, Adolf Hitler's American publisher engaged in a copyright lawsuit against an American journalist who published a tabloid version of the book without permission.

Before Alan Cranston became a US Senator for California, he was foreign correspondent in Germany for the Independent News Service. In a particularly colorful 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cranston recounts seeing an English-language version of Mein Kampf on display at Macy's bookstore in 1939, but when he picked it up,"[he] knew it wasn't the real book because it was much less weighty, it was much thinner.  It turned out it had been edited so that a good bit that Hitler wrote was left out."

On January 1, 2016 one of the most infamous books of the 20^th century, Mein Kampf, will go into the public domain and will be published in Germany for the first time in 70 years. German media professor Nikolaus Peifer explains to Bob how Germans are trying to manage and contextualize the book’s release in order to minimalize its impact.