Heroes of the Reich
With the lifting in Germany of the ban on the publication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, can we expect a washout of the main movers and shakers of that controversial period? The lifting of the ban has been reluctant. The truth is that the copyright period has come to an end. Bavarian copyright holders have few options in this regard. The thinking behind the measure is, “if we don’t publish the former chancellor’s memoirs, others will.” Too late, that genie is already out of the lamp; The relative liberalization of the Internet has taken care of this.
More worrying is the potential torrent of literature published by Hitler’s Reich that could accompany the notorious chronicles of the fuhrer. Much of the propaganda radiating from Nazi-controlled Munich and Berlin in the 1930s and during the war was published in English. This leaves the doors open to plagiarists of books. Many revisionists might sympathize with the Nazi Reich.
Military history has always attracted a large readership. Conventional bookstores have sections reserved for history. Dilemma, much of the history section is dominated by material that focuses on the Reich and WWII. It is well known in publishing circles that the two best-selling book types begin with the letter ‘s’ denoting sex and swastikas. Such is the public fascination in the period that publishers admit that swastikas on a book cover can double sales.
The Heroes of the Reich title published by Amazon Books and Amazon Kindle is a good example. The author of the book offers mini-biographies on those figures who were revered in Hitler’s Germany. Surprisingly, although many of these “heroes” are German citizens, many, such as Winifred Wagner of England and Reich Foreign Minister Alfred Rosenberg, were not German. Another cause for surprise is that many figures idolized in Nazi Germany were more popular in the West than in the Nazi Reich. Among them are conductor Herbert von Karajan and internationally revered soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Both were enthusiastic and paid members of Hitler’s National Socialist Party.
The Heroes of the Reich book is a compelling read. To be fair, some of the characters covered have already inspired great movies. As far as my feet can take me tells the odyssey of a German prisoner of the Soviets. Clemens Forell escaped the Gulag and made a dangerous 13,000-kilometer trek back to his home country. The buccaneer exploits of Luftwaffe fighter escape artist Franz von Werra were chronicled in the film The One That Got Away.
To preserve the credibility of the charm of the Heroes of the Reich, the author tries his best to write objectively. This may seem like a way to disinfect the images portrayed in the book’s forty or so biographical chapters. The best advice is to read the book and interpret things as you wish. It happened a long time ago.