One of the great publishing taboos of modern Germany is beginning to buckle: historians are pressing the authorities to bring out a new edition of Adolf Hitler’s poisonously anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Sales of the rambling 700-page book have been outlawed in Germany since the author killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945. It was the book that made Hitler into a millionaire, paid for his chauffeur-driven Mercedes and, according to some historians, should have tipped off the world that the Nazi leader was planning genocide on the Jews.

Oscar Schneider, who runs the Nuremberg documentation centre at the site of Hitler’s mass rallies, is urging the Bavarian government, which owns the copyright on Mein Kampf, to lift the ban as soon as possible. “That copyright runs out in 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death, and we have to be prepared that neo-Nazis will distribute the book in large quantities and use it for their own propaganda purposes,” he said. The only sensible course was to start work immediately on a comprehensive, academically annotated edition, he said.

Historians at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich agree. Horst Möller, the director of the institute, said: “All kinds of inflammatory Nazi writings have been published in a scientific format, except for Mein Kampf. It is not justifiable to prohibit the publication of this particular document out of fear that it might have a negative, symbolic effect.”

One historian at Professor Möller’s Institute, Dieter Pohl, said that producing an annotated version would require “a hellish amount of time and resources”. Most historians calculate on it taking at least three years to make sense of Hitler’s writings and track down all of his sources.

Time, the historians say, is running out. “A critical edition of the text will give everyone the possibility to gather the arguments needed to win the discussion”, another Munich historian, Udo Wengst, says. Win, that is, the argument with the far-Right, which is able to access an unfiltered version of Mein Kampf already through internet sites. In theory a new edition, padded with commentary and context, could be put on the internet to counter the ones being sneak-read by Germans.

The Bavarian government acquired the copyright because Munich was the last official place of residence of Hitler. Since the 1950s it has opposed fiercely attempts to publish the book in Germany. Although about ten million copies of the book had been distributed by the end of the war – every newlywed couple in the Third Reich received a copy – it can now be found only in secondhand bookshops, where it can be legally sold providing there is no swastika on the cover.

Libraries keep the original under the counter and most librarians insist that readers who request it demonstrate a genuine historical interest in the work. The authorities have been less successful in stopping foreign publication. It has been a strong seller in the Arab world and Turkey. English editions are freely available.

The first volume of Mein Kampf – “My Struggle” – was written in prison after the failure of the so-called Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. A second volume was dictated after Hitler’s release in 1924. Hitler set out his brand of racial nationalism, urging racial “purity”, so that no “racially inferior” people mated with “Aryan” Germans.

The “intentionalist” school of historians say that Hitler’s determination to destroy Jewish culture and kill millions of Jews was clear for those with the patience and stamina to read his book. But others say there is no explicit call for genocide. The Bavarian government says that there is no need for a new edition and the federal Government is nervous about the negative publicity that would be stirred by a modern Mein Kampf.

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