‘Mein Kampf’ Banned in Stores Selling to GIs

FRANKFURT, West Germany — U.S. military officials have ordered a bookstore chain catering to American soldiers to stop selling Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic book “Mein Kampf,” an official said today.

Hitler’s book has been banned at the 158 Stars and Stripes bookstores in Germany, said Deane McDermott, circulation manager for the U.S. government organization in Darmstadt.

“Mein Kampf” and other Nazi literature has been banned in Germany for decades, McDermott said, but Stars and Stripes stores had been selling about 70 copies a month of the book.

“It is against German law even to display the book,” McDermott said. “We’re guests in Germany and I think we should show certain respect to our hosts.”

Sales of English versions of “Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” at Stars and Stripes stores came to the attention of American military officials in Berlin last week when a television program, “Abendschau,” showed one of its reporters purchasing the book at the store in Berlin’s Truman Plaza.

The book is filled with anti-Semitic outpourings and describes a struggle for world domination.

McDermott said the subject of Nazism has become increasingly sensitive in recent days after last week’s 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht and former German Parliament speaker Philipp Jenninger’s controversial speech marking the occasion.

Crystal Night, or night of broken glass, was a night of terror when Nazi sympathizers burned and looted Jewish businesses and synagogues in what is considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews, Gypsies and others deemed “undesirables” were systematically killed.