My Talk on Nazi Propaganda at the Harold Deutsch Roundtable

Back in November 2023 I gave a lecture to the Harold Deutsch Roundtable in Minneapolis on Nazi propaganda that is avilable here. My talk starts at 16:15.

Adventures with Copytrack

If you are reading this, you may well have received an alarming letter from a German firm by the name of Copytrack. It orders you to provide a license for images on your website, demanding a sometimes exorbitant sum for past and future use of the image or images should you not be able to do that.

Having received such a message myself, and having spent time investigating the matter, my experiences may be useful to others.

Who is this for?

I am discussing the situation in the United States only, for ordinary bloggers who earn little or no money from their blog and who are alarmed by an email demanding lots of money. If you have a company, you will want to check with your attorney.

How does Copytrack work?

People who claim ownership of images upload those images to Copytrack, which then does a reverse image search and provides to its clients places where the images are found. The client asserts that it owns the images. Copytrack then sends increasingly insistent emails threatening dire fates for those who do not immediately pay.

Now, one small corner of Copytrack’s efforts is legitimate. Artists and designers are understandably angry when others appropriate their work without compensation. Copytrack helps some people receive payment for their work.

There are two major problems.

First, Copytrack takes the word of its clients that they own the images. This results in many false claims. The favorite example is that Copytrack went after the official White House photographer tor using images that he took, and which are legally in the public domain. Many others report being dunned for using public domain images.

Second, Copytrack demands outrageous amounts of cash.

My Experience

I maintain a scholarly website called the German Propaganda Archive. It has translations and images of propaganda from the Nazi and East German periods. The copyright status of such material is sometimes tangled, but is either in the public domain in the United States or past copyright expiration deadlines.

On April 12, 2024, Copytrack sent the first email demanding that I either provide proof of a license from their client or go to their web site and pay €15,000, enough to give anyone pause.

On April 20, a second email arrived with similar content. The deadline was May 4.

Their last “reminder” arrived on May 2, with a deadline of May 12.

I haven’t heard anything since then, but won’t be surprised if I get more “friendly” reminders.

I was not concerned with their emails, since the images in question are not owned by their German client, and even if they were, the images are in the public domain in the United States.

What do you do if you hear from Copyrack?

First, determine whether you are infringing someone’s copyright. If so, you may well be liable. However, Copytrack will demand an unreasonable fee. Remember that they are not themselves attorneys, so their demand has no legal force. You might make a reasonable offer for use of the image, far less than they demand, but as I suggest later, since Copytrack is a scummy operation, ignoring them is probably the best policy.

Second, they are based in Germany. That doesn’t mean they can’t hire an attorney and sue you in the United States, but if you are a run-of-the-mill blogger netting $150 a year from your site, they are highly unlikely to sue. Why?

1. Hiring a intellectual property attorney in the United States can run $200 and up an hour.

2. Although copyright violations can result in fines of up to $150,000, which sounds scary, that figure is rather like the notice on videos threatening the wrath of the FBI on those who violate copyright. Ever hear of a neighbor who went to jail for copying a video? The point is that lawsuits are expensive and you are unlikely be sued if there is little to be gained.

Assuming they sue, in an American court they need to demonstrate:

That their client suffered financial loss from your use of the image. If you have a blog with limited appeal, that will be difficult to prove.

That you benefitted financially from using the image. Again, this is unlikely for most bloggers.

That your use was willful. That is, you knew the material was under copyright. Being ignorant doesn’t absolve you, but would likely reduce the legal liability.

There is another possibility under American law called “Statutory Damages,” which requires that the owner actually register the copyright, which I won’t go into here, but include a link that explains it.

Now, this is all a tad complicated and I am not an attorney. However, reading these four pages from knowledgable sources should calm your concerns.

Deciphering Copyright Damages

Potential Damages for Copyright Infringement

Assessing Copyright Infringement Damages

Statutory Damages

In short…..

If you are a blogger who receives limited or no income from your blog, my suggestion is to ignore Copytrack’s emails. It isn’t profitable for them to take legal action against you and they know that many of their claims are bogus. They hope legal language will intimidate those not familiar with copyright law.

2300 Letters from East Germany

This is not a typical post, but it provides some background to my interest in the German Democratic Republic. After ten years of studying Nazi propaganda, I broadened my interests and began looking into East Germany. I made a brief visit to East Berlin in 1986 and subscribed to East German magazines and newspapers. They were cheap. I got Neues Deutschland, the daily newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party, airmailed to me for $22 a year. I also subscribed to the Wochenpost, Eulespiegel, and Sonntag at equally friendly rates.

The GDR also ran Hochschulferienkursen, three-week summer courses for foreign teachers of German, which I am not. Anyone was welcome, however, if they paid in foreign currency, They provided a cheap way to visit East Germany and provided an open visa. I attended the first one in July 1988 in Leipzig.

It was a fascinating experience. I lived with a family. I got their daughter’s bedroom. One of her proud possessions was a bottle of American tabasco sauce. She had what looked to be a telephone, but it only connected to another pseudo-phone in the house. There was a very long waiting list for phones at the time.

I felt guilty about displacing her, so toward the end of my stay I asked her parents if I could take her to the Intershop. Many coveted items were available only there — for foreign currency. The waiting list for a car in East Germany was around ten years. With foreign currency, one could get a Mercedes almost immediately, along with Japanese television sets and other such products.

In retrospect, I should have been more generous. I gave her a budget of 40 West German Marks. She thought long about what to get, finally deciding on some Western clothing and a Coke.

I was interviewed by East German television and had a moment of fame on the national evening news.

Since my German is good, if heavily accented, people immediately recognized that I was American. They wanted to talk. People would invite me over, we’d talk into the night, and they’d ask when could I come again. People felt safe talking with me. Finally I had found a place that recognized what a fascinating person I was…

Still, there was nervousness. During one conversation a man paused, then said: “Ten years ago this conversation would have meant ten years in Bautzen [a GDR prison]. With certainty. Those times are past. [Pause] I hope.”

Now and again I needed East German currency. The official rate was one East German Mark to one West German Mark, but the black market rate was around 10-1. I’d surprise my acquaintances by (illegally) buying Marks from them at the official rate. I’d explain that I liked to be law abiding, but I preferred to deal with them rather than the Staatsbank der DDR.

The experience was stimulating and I decided I needed to know more East Germans. How to do that?

The Wochenpost had a penpal column. Everyone listed was from the Soviet bloc or from countries like India or Egypt. I never saw an American (or other Western) address. But, I thought, it’s worth a try. In January 1989 I sent in my address. I expected that nothing would come of it. Since my issues of the Wochenpost came by surface mail I didn’t realize my address had been printed until a day in April 1989 when five letters arrived from East Berlin. I was puzzled until I opened the first one. Wochenpost had published my address. All people knew is that I was 38, married, and could write in German. Mine was probably the first such address in the history of the GDR. Things in early 1989 were beginning to loosen.

The letters kept coming. A dozen the next day, twenty the day after. One day, the postal carrier came to the door with tray of 230 letters, curious about what was going on. By the time the flow of letters ended I had received about 2300 missives from East Germans eager to write to an American.

My prospective correspondents realized that I would receive a flood of letters. Many said they realized I’d probably not be able to write to them, but hoped I might have a willing friend. The local newspaper ran a picture of me behind a stack of letters. I found about 400 people who were interested in writing to an East German.

I picked about a dozen people who wrote particularly interested letters, including a few with some involvement with the GDR media. But what about all those people I couldn’t write to? I’d asked them to write to me. I couldn’t ignore them.

I decided on a “form letter.” I wrote a four-page letter to the people I’d heard from by June 1989, explaining that I couldn’t write to everyone, but thanked them for their interest and told them something about myself. I gave all the letters to my secretary to type into a list and ran mailing labels. She never quite forgave me.

Now, mailing that many letters was going to be expensive. But it turns out there is the equivalent of international junk mail which allows one to pay by the pound, not the individual letter. There is a permit required. It turns out there was one permit holder in Grand Rapids, the Reformed Ecumenical Synod (now the Reformed Ecumenical Council). They had understandable sympathy for a professor at Calvin College and agreed to allow me to use their permit.

Im May 1989 I sent mail sack with the first 1800 responses by air to East Berlin.

Now, I expected that one of two things would happen. Either all of them would be destroyed, or the Stasi officials who read foreign mail would read a few, decide they were relatively innocuous, and let them through. It turned out to be more interesting than that.

The letters went from East Berlin to the ten regional GDR post offices. About half of those post offices thew them all away (those areas including Leipzig, Halle, Dresden, and Karl-Marx-Stadt). The other regional post offices let them through.

I realized this quickly. I began getting letters from those who understood my problem, but implored me to find another American for them to write to. All of those letters came from certain postal districts, none from the others.

In July 1989 I was enrolled in a second Hochschulferienkurs, this time in Halle (where no letters had been delivered). I took along some addresses of people who had written me and knocked on some doors. People were surprised to see me.

I told one woman who I was, that she had written to me months back, and here I was. She, like the others, was dumbfounded. We talked for a bit, then made arrangements to meet the next week at a nearby restaurant. When we met then she began by saying: “Randy, when you left last week I was afraid you were with the Stasi.” After I stopped laughing, I asked why she would think such a thing.

Well, she had had a relationship with an Austrian businessman who was often in Halle. One day she stepped out of her apartment to go to work and two gentlemen asked her to come along with them. They were obviously Stasi, and one didn’t say no. As she was in the waiting room with others, they discussed why they were there. It turned out that all had some sort of relationship with a Westerner. That was not illegal, but neither was it desired. The Stasi agents explained to her that it might be better not to continue such contacts. Given that experience, it was plausible that I could be a Stasi operative, checking up on her.

Then came fall 1989 and the rotten GDR structure collapsed with astonishingly little violence. I had friends in Leipzig who marched in the demos, fully conscious of the presence of armed state forces that might open fire. For a variety of reasons, they didn’t and once the GDR’s citizens realized that the state was no longer willing to use violence, the system collapsed.

One of the consequences of the end of the GDR was Der Bundesbeauftrage für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (the Gauck Commission), which allowed people see edited copies of their Stasi file. I applied to see mine, confident that there had to be a file on me.

To my disappointment, there wasn’t. I was told that some documents were not yet available and that I could ask again after two years, but I never got around to it.

The only trace of me in the Stasi’s files turned out to be a letter one of my correspondent’s father’s file.

The Great Translation Movement and Me

I recently learned of the Great Translation Movement, a fascinating project begun shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An anonymous group is posting translations of Chinese material, approved by government censors, but not intended for international distribution.

It turns out that according to an article in The Atlantic, my book Bending Spines: The Propagangandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Repupblic, had at least some influence on the originators of the project.

Can I say that I am delighted, minor though my part in this great project may be?

On Nazi Speaking Guidelines

The Nazi Party had a large speaker corps.  They needed regular instruction on what to say in meetings throughout Germany.  There is a fair amount of material on the system on the GPA.

Recently, I added to my collection of the Aufklärungs- und Redner-Informationsmaterial issued by the party’s central propaganda office in cooperation with the  German Labor Front, although I am not sure how much of a contribution the latter organization made

I am adding some anti-Semitic instructions from March and April 1943.

That got me to review material on the GPA issued during the anti-Semitic campaigns of spring 1943.  There are general campaign guidelines, speaker information, articles by Joseph Goebbels, and directives for magazine editors.  Since it might be interesting to compare what was said in various places, here is a list of the material available on the GPA.

• Directives for the Anti-Bolshevist Propaganda Action: 20 February 1943
• Goebbels’s essay “The European Crisis”: 28 February 1943
• What Does Bolshevization Mean in Reality?: March 1943
• Speaker Express Information (“The Jewish Question as a Weapon at Home and Abroad”): 5 May 1943
• Goebbels’s essay “The War and the Jews”: 9 May 1943
• Speaker Express Information (“Twilight of the Jews”): 18 May 1943
• Anti-Semitic directives for magazine editors: 21 May 1943
• Goebbels’s essay “Driving Forces”: 6 June 1943

I don’t know of a complete set of this material.  I have most, but all of it.  For those who might find it useful, I provide an index to my collection.

Anything You Would Like Me to Add?

The German Propaganda Archive at this point has a wide range of material.  I tend to add things that strike my interest at the moment.

However, I am open to suggestions.  Is there anything you wish were available on the site, but isn’t?

I’m Banned Again in China

Back in 2012 a Chinese translation of my book Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic appeared.  Shortly after publication the Chinese government ordered the publisher not to distribute further copies.  About a year after that, the ban seems to have been lifted.

A Chinese contact tells me that the ban is again in force and that the book is again unavailable.

Some copies did circulate and there are a variety of interesting comments on Douban, a Chinese book site.

The Chinese government exerts substantial control over what can appear, both in print and on the Internet.  A reader of this blog informed me that copies of an atlas were seized from his school, since one of the maps depicted Taiwan in a different color than the People’s Republic of China. I was surprised that the book was published in China to begin with, given its suggestion that Marxism-Leninism (and by extension its Chinese variant) were comparable in some ways to Nazi Germany.

I’d welcome further information from any Chinese readers.

P. G. Wodehouse in Germany

Those who admire P. G. Wodehouse, which should be about everyone, may be interested in an article I recently published in Plum Lines: The Quarterly Journal of The Wodehouse Society, Summer 2016.

Wodehouse’s books were published by the Tauchnitz Verlag, which had a long history of issuing English editions of British and American authors for Continental readers.  They published many of Wodehouse’s novels, including some that included brief, but critical mentions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

It turns out that Tauchnitz simply cut awkward passages.  The article looks at what disappeared in the editions published in Germany.  If you are interested and aren’t a member of The Wodehouse Society, drop me a note and I can provide a copy.

Nazi Uses of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”

Holocaust and Genocide Studies just published my article “Believing in ‘Inner Truth’: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Nazi Propaganda, 1933-1945.” Here’s the abstract:

Although most leading Nazis realized that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a spurious document, they found it useful in promoting belief in the international Jewish conspiracy of which they were already convinced. Authorship and other details were irrelevant, they averred, if the book expressed “inner truth.”

The GPA includes the introduction to a Nazi edition of the Protocols.

Goebbels and Truth

For some years a colleague and I have been working to discourage the use of a dubious quotation by Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

No one ever provides a source for the quotation.  Our point is not that Goebbels always told the truth, but rather that an effective propagandist is unlikely to say in public that he lies. Goebbels prefered to tell the truth, or at least part of it, whenever possible, since clear lies reduce the effectiveness of propaganda.  

I recently came across an interesting 1940 Nazi poster announcing Goebbels’s love of truth:

The truth is always stronger than the lie

In 1940 it was easy for Goebbels to tell most of the truth most of the time, since Nazi forces were winning on every front.  In 1945, to the contrary, he had a problem  Although he told some bald-faced lies then, he more often resorted to vague claims that Germany would somehow still win the war because of its insurmountable will.

Growing On-Line Resources on Nazi Propaganda

Increasing numbers of German sources are available on-line. I try to keep my page on such items up-to-date, but it’s a challenge.  Particularly valuable are the long runs of newspapers that are appearing.

Books on Julius Streicher

To my surprise, it took along time to get a biography of Julius Streicher.  My dissertation on him was finished in 1975 and appeared in book form in 1983, with a second somewhat expanded edition in 2001.  It has sold well over the years and is the only English-language book on Streicher that remains in print.

Since I am a rhetorician, however,  I was interested more in the content of Streicher’s propaganda than in his biography, but since there was so little in English I did give two chapters of biographical material.  It was rather thin, and as a graduate student at the time I was only able to manage about a month in the German archives.  I missed some useful sources and other valuable sources surfaced after I completed the book.

Dennis E. Schowalter’s Little Man, What Now? Der Stürmer in der Weimar Republic is a fine book that appeared in 1982, but as the title suggests covers only the period before 1933.

There is also William P. Varga’s The Number One Nazi Jew-Baiter (New York: Carlton Press,  1981).  It was originally his 1974 dissertation at Ohio State.  Like my book, he did not have access to a variety of useful sources.

After that there was a long silence. Streicher was the most prominent Nazi leader who lacked a full biography.  There were books and articles that covered aspects of Streicher’s career, but the kinds of books one can find about Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders were missing.

That situation has now been remedied.  First came Franco Ruault, who completed an enormous dissertation at the University of Innsbruck in 2006.  It was published in two parts totaling over 950 pages:

“Neuschöpfer des deutschen Volkes”.  Julius Streicher im Kampf gegen “Rassenschande” (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006)

and Tödliche Maskaraden. Julius Streicher und die “Lösung der Judenfrage” (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009).

It’s hard to know what to say about Ruault’s project.  It’s not a biography, although it has biographical elements, and it’s not really a study of Der Stürmer and its propaganda, although it does cover some of that.  Ruault is interested in patriarchy and sexuality.  The prose is sometimes obtuse — although I have difficulties reading similar material in English so it just may be my denseness.  His books aren’t the place to start if you are interested in Streicher.

Then there is Ralph Keyser's Der Stürmer: Instrument de l'idéologie nazie, une analyse des caricatures d'intoxication (L’Harmattan, 2012).  This looks to be more a study of the Stürmer’s contents than a biography, but since I don’t read French I cannot say much about it.

I’ve just finished reading the book I’m surprised did not get written years ago: Daniel Roos’s Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer” 1923-1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014).  

It’s based on his 2013 dissertation at the University of Würzburg. It is a fine piece of work. I learned a lot.  Roos had access to a much wider range of sources than I did back in the mid-1970s.  He does a good job of laying out Streicher’s biography and also of analyzing the anti-Semitic content of Der Stürmer.  It is well-written.

At over 500 pages, Roos’s book does suffer from the weakness of dissertation writers, which is to include everything one finds.  The book would have been better, perhaps, were it one hundred pages shorter.  Still, this is where to start if you are interested in Julius Streicher, assuming you read German.  Otherwise, you can always read my book.

Wochenspruch der NSDAP

I have hundreds of examples of the Wochenspruch der NSDAP on the site.  This was a weekly poster with inspiring quotations issued between 1937 and 1944.  Before 1940, many were issued by the Gauleitungen, afterwards (mostly) by the Reichspropagandaleitung.  My page is the most complete collection available, but it is not complete.   New ones surface every now and then.

Just yesterday I found confirmation that the final issue (which I have not seen) was #15/1944.  The image is courtesy of MAR Historical.

I, and others, are attempting to find as many of these as we can.  Should you have ones not on my site, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

Nazi Uses of the Word “Nazi”

Every now and then someone claims that the Nazis never used the word “Nazi” to refer to themselves.  This is simply untrue.  They did not use the term often, but I’ve come across a variety of references over the years.  Here are eight examples (in the original German). If the source is on the GPA I’ve included a link.  The posting below this one has a ninth example.  Since the Nazis kept that pamphlet in print until at least 1931, they can’t have objected to the use of the term too much...

1. “Mit großem Stimmaufwand und viel Tintenverschwendung verkündeten die roten Volksbeglücker, die Nazis sind Reaktionäre.”  Source: Heinz Franke, Die Journaille lügt!  (1932)
2. “Aber wir Nazis werden immer sehr schnell einig, da wir an solche Fragen mit gesundem Menschenverstand herangehen.”  Goebbels Diaries, entry for 15 March 1933.
3.  “Er [Streicher] ist ein Original, aber ein richtiger Nazi.”  Goebbels Diaries, entry for 26 March 1939.
4. “(Ich freue mich eigentlich über jenes Gerücht, das ich höre. Gibt es doch für einen Redner keine besser Gelegenheit, ‘abzurechnen.’ Dies Wort hat für uns Nazi-Redner seinen eigenen, besonderen Reiz.)” Source: Kurt Rittweger, Der unbekannte Redner der Partei (Tagebuchskizzen eines Redners) (Munich: J. B. Linde, 1939), p. 27.
5. “...in den Betrieben bekamen die jungen Nazis allmählich die Oberhand….”  Source: Die Kieler Hitlerjugend, p. 14.
6. “Für uns Frankfurter Nazis  knüpft sich an den Namen die Erinnerung an einen der heißesten Kämpfe im politischen Ringen um die Macht.” Source: Adalbert Giebel,  So kämpften wir! Schilderungen aus der Kampfzeit der NSDAP. im Gau Hessen Nassau, p. 38.
7. “Gewiß haben die alten Nazis von der Kampfzeit her ein dickes Fell, und sie sind nicht prüde, es kann sie auch nicht so leicht etwas unterwerfen.”  Source: “Das Gerücht,” Der Hoheitsträger, September 1943, pp. 3-8.
8. “Der alte Nazi nickt und denkt einen Augenblick zurück. Wie war es doch, als seine Ortsgruppe aus wenigen Männern bestand, die als hoffnungslose Irre galten?”  Der Sprechabenddienst, March/April 1944, p. 15.  This was a publication for party propagandists. 

I could give more examples, but the range is sufficient to demonstrate that the term “Nazi” was used by the Nazis.

Update on a Blacklisted Book

After some further investigation, this is what seems to have happened.  The Chinese publisher of my book Bending Spines sent out some copies to a major Chinese mail order company.  After those had been shipped, they got a call from a government official instructing them not to ship any more.  Apparently, they were not ordered to recall the copies already released.  Perhaps as many as a thousand copies are thus “in the wild” in China.  It is anyone’s guess if and when the government may change its mind and allow further distribution.

Bytwerk Book Banned in China

My book Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic has been translated into French and Chinese.  The Chinese edition appeared in July, and Chinese contacts tell me that was banned shortly afterward by the Chinese government.

I’m trying to get more details, which I will post here as I learn them.  Apparently the book’s discussion of totalitarianism and propaganda did not meet the approval of the Chinese authorities.

UPDATE:  The book remains available in Hong Kong.

Violence in Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda

Two months back I gave a paper at Texas A & M University’s conference on symbolic violence.  The paper ended up having so many images that I can’t think of a good place to publish it, so for the time being I am making it available here.

It looks at the range of Nazi anti-Semitism, examining how Nazi violence against Jews was presented as justified self-defense, whereas alleged Jewish violence against Germany was portrayed as part of the Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world.

Paintings from Hitler’s Personal Collection

I have a page of Nazi war art on the GPA.  One of the paintings is by Franz Eichhorst.  It was titled “Remembrance of Stalingrad.”

A Nazi  art magazine Kunst dem Volk considered it a masterpiece:

“The pale colors, the splendid presentation, and the solemnity of the moment are emphasized in this picture, which has an almost monumental character. Although the painting demonstrates the artistic understanding of the painter and also his mastery of drawing, one forgets it all because of the artist’s splendid work, accepting it as obvious and given. That is probably the best that a painting can do.”

It turns out that the painting ended up in Hitler’s personal collection and disappeared after the war.  It was just found in a Czech monastery along with six other paintings.

More on a Bad Translation of Mein Kampf

In 2009, one Michael Ford published a bad translation of Mein Kampf, which I discussed in an earlier post.

What I find astonishing, although it is typical of Internet discussions, is that those who for some reason like his translation accuse me of making up Ford's mistakes.

Well, I suppose it is time to make the evidence available. I've started a page that demonstrates errors in Michael Ford's translation. If anyone is interested, I'll add to the page as time goes on.

The Case of the Curious Translation of Mein Kampf

Ordinarily, I post items here that relate directly to the German Propaganda Archive. This is one of the occasional exceptions.

Two months back, I was reading the Wikipedia article on Mein Kampf. According to said article, the finest translation was that by one Michael Ford. That interested me. I know a lot about Mein Kampf, and I had never heard of it. I looked into it. Ford, as it turned out, had self-published the translation, then using the anonymity offered by Wikipedia, and in violation of its policies, had inserted the high praise. I removed those edits. When he discovered that a month or so later, he tried to re-insert his praise of his own book, but the violations of Wikipedia policies were so clear that others promptly reverted his edits as fast as he made them. He's given up on that, at least for the moment.

Then I want to amazon, where I found the book was selling well, in part due to a number of 5-star reviews that appeared suspiciously soon after the book’s publication last summer. He had also published a book that promoted his translation, claiming he had the only “correct” translation, one that remedied all sorts of previous errors. Mr. Ford is clearly a master of self-promotion. He is, by the way, a self-described entrepreneur whose other books include how to avoid being scammed on eBay and finding a job if you are a felon. Despite my requests, he has not provided any information on his background that would make one likely to trust his ability to translate Mein Kampf, which is a challenge even for experienced translators.

I posted a negative review, pointing out some typical howlers in translation that he had committed. If you are curious, look up my review on amazon. To date, Mr. Ford simply repeats that his version is the only “correct” one, and claims that it is the standard translation. For obvious reasons, he cannot provide the names of significant scholars in the field who agree with him.

In the meanwhile, Mr. Ford has won the support of a band of “historical revisionists” who are involved in web sites that try to appear as “objective” scholarly sites, though a quick read reveals their nature. I do not think Mr. Ford himself has such tendencies — but he is happy to accept the support of anyone who approves of his work, as best as I can tell.