Scholars are troubled by legal battle over Goebbels’s diaries

Historians have pointed to the dire implications for research of the royalties claim being brought by the heirs of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, against the publisher Random House Germany.

The claim concerns extracts from diaries quoted in the biography Goebbels by Peter Longerich, professor of modern German history at Royal Holloway, University of London. The English edition is due to be published next month. 

The lawyer acting for the Goebbels estate, Cordula Schacht -- the daughter of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s minister of economics, who was acquitted at Nuremberg -- is seeking just over €6,300 ($6,925) for the material quoted. The Higher Regional Court of Munich will pass judgment in July. 

Many historians have hitherto assumed that no such claims would be made. It had never occurred to Saul Friedländer, emeritus professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles -- and one of the leading authorities on the Holocaust -- to “ask for an authorization from the Goebbels estate to quote from his diaries.”

Dan Stone, professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, said that he had “ordinarily simply assume[d] that published works and papers of Nazis are citable without any copyright issues. I regularly cite works by Nazi race theorists, some better known than others, in my work, and I do so on the assumption that there are no copyright issues.”  ...