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Wednesday, March 29, 2000
Mein Kampf, trial wake Nazi ghosts Czech publication of Hitler tome adds to Gross horror By Ivan Remias More than 60 years after the author barred its publication in Czech, considering it an "unworthy" language, an unabridged translation of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is now available in bookstores nationwide. The publication comes as Central Europe finds itself awash in Nazi-era controversies. In Hitler's native Austria, where the book is banned, the rise to power of ultranationalist Jorg Haider and the recent high-profile trial of Heinrich Gross, a Nazi doctor, has revived debate on Hitler-era issues. Ironically, the Otakar II publishing house that released Hitler's seminal work on March 21 published a translation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence earlier this year and has Karl Marx's Das Kapital ready to go in April. Irresponsible publishing "We should have a chance to have our own opinion about the issue," Otakar director Michal Zitko said. "Now we're able to criticize Hitler and his perverted ideology on the basis of facts, not mediated impressions." The timing did not favor Zitko, who released 10,000 copies of Mein Kampf, a large run by Czech standards, the same day Gross went on trial in Vienna. Gross is alleged to have experimented on children's brains in a Nazi-run, Vienna-based euthanasia clinic. He is charged with complicity in the death of nine handicapped children in the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, where prosecutors say hundreds of youths were experimented on and allowed to die because their "abnormalities" were inconsistent with Hitler's vision of an Aryan master race. The trial of Gross, 84, Austria's first war-crimes trial in two decades, was adjourned after a psychiatrist's report declared that he suffered from dementia. Mein Kampf, which first articulated young Hitler's view of a world populated by "perfect white Aryans" and cleansed of Jewish and Marxist "parasites," is banned in Austria, Hungary and Germany, whose Prague Embassy is probing the publication at the request of the Baverian government. By contrast, the volume is freely available in the United States, England, Russia and Romania. The tome was published twice before in the Czech lands, in 1936 and 1993. On both occasions, the work was abridged and annotated. The 1993 version contained remarks by Jiri Hajek, a member of the 1968 Prague Spring movement and a former foreign minister. Tomas Kraus, executive director of the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities, assailed the publication. He said the "uproar" over Mein Kampf and the Gross trial was not an accident. "It is a logical consequence of the 50 years during which the process of 'laundering' history has been frozen." He added that while potentially harmful information about Nazi propaganda and methods was now available on the World Wide Web, "to spread such book as Mein Kampf freely in the market is even more dangerous." Prague publisher Fedor Gal, a Slovak Jew born in the Terezin concentration camp, was more pointed. "For fascists and radical groups, it will become a cult piece," Gal said, assailing Otakar's decision to mass-market the book. "Using this book to make money is the [publishing] business at its worst and most spoiled." Zitko said he expected the Jewish protests but asserted that Germany, partially as a result of its Mein Kampf ban, "has the highest number of neo-Nazis in Central Europe." The state prosecutor's office has launched a probe to determine whether publication of the book violates laws against the spread of Nazi and fascist propaganda. Gruesome allegations The gruesome nature of the allegations against Gross, who was tried twice before but escaped on technicalities, exacerbated the focus on the Nazi legacy. Some 75,000 people, including 5,000 children, were murdered across occupied Europe during World War II. Hitler's regime labelled them "unworthy lives," although many of the victims were used for medical experiments. In February 1998, Austrian prosecutors recovered 400 brains that Gross, once a prominent neurologist and expert witness, had privately preserved in formaldehyde. Researchers studying them noted traces of sleeping pills, which suggested the children were drugged and murdered. One of the witnesses against Gross, Waltraud Haupl, told The Guardian that her 4-year-old sister, Annemarie, was admitted to the clinic suffering from rickets in 1943. She died in Gross' care 15 months later after being declared "an idiot." The term was used regularly to explain why patients died or emerged from the clinic with their mental faculties impaired. Annemarie's preserved brain, among those found by prosecutors, was vital evidence against Gross. Gross recently told the Austrian magazine News, "I never sped up anyone's death, nor did I assign anyone to do so." He also says he was a military doctor and was not present in Vienna at the time of the alleged experimentation. Ivan Remias' e-mail address is iremias@praguepost.cz
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