naked dictators: a webcomic

“Where do you think the royalties to Mein Kampf go?” I asked my coworker the other day. “I mean, I know he has living relatives, but do they actually take that money?”

He didn’t know and we went on with our day. About twenty minutes later, he started reading aloud an article online about where all the money goes. Turns out, the story is more complicated than I thought, due to the fact that several publishers looking to cash in on Hitler’s bullshit put out their own translations.

In the U.S., Houghton Mifflin put out an abridged version, which — no surprise here — pissed a lot of people off. As for the royalties, Hitler’s relatives, who all changed their name to something that wasn’t Hitler, all refused the money. From ‘42 to ‘79, most of the profits went directly to the Justice Department (by force, it seems) for the War Claims Fund, who passed the money on to victims of the war. From ‘79 to 2000, the company reportedly took in $400,000 in royalties from the book and gave it all up to charity, although I can’t find which ones.

In England, publisher Huchinson published their own translation, donating all the money to charity, which was eventually revealed to be the German Welfare Council, until 2001, when the chairman refused any more of the money. No one wanted anything to do with it. Huchinson was eventually bought by Random House, who was bought by the German company Bertelsmann. Although it was — and still is — illegal to sell Mein Kampf in Germany, Bertelsmann’s ownership of the rights was no problem as long as they didn’t sell it in Germany.

Things then got uncomfortable when, in 1999, Mein Kampf wound up the ranked number 2 on Amazon’s bestsellers to Germany, which led both Amazon and Barnes and Noble to block all online sales of the book to German customers.

[Source]

I have also read before that membership numbers of white supremacist groups skyrocketed after Obama was elected, so I tried to do a search to find out if sales of Mein Kampf increased as well, but just wound up with a bunch of articles mentioning how professional doucherocket Ann Coulter referred to Obama’s first book as a “dimestore Mein Kampf,” once again doing her part to lower the bar of political discourse. My whole theory was then derailed when I realized that most white supremacists probably can’t read.