A copy of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" owned by the Nazi leader himself and found in his Munich apartment sold for $20,655 in the United States on Friday, an auction house said.
The book, which is bound in red leather, was discovered by American soldiers who liberated Munich at the end of World War II, said Alexander Historical Auctions.
It was likely kept by Hitler for his own use or as a potential gift for an admirer, the auction house said.
The flyleaf is signed by 11 officers from a U.S. field artillery battalion of the 45th Infantry Division, the first soldiers to liberate Munich.
"From Adolph Hitlers [sic] apartment in Munich on May 2 1945," wrote one officer followed by his signature and that of 10 others.
An August 20, 2015 letter from the daughter of Captain Daniel Allen of the 45th Infantry Division says that her father, who belonged to a field artillery unit, brought the book home with him at the end of the war.
There were more than 10 bidders, on phone and online, and the book sold to an American buyer, the auction house in Chesapeake City, Maryland told AFP. It had been valued pre-sale at $12,000 to 15,000.
Hitler wrote the book in 1924 while in jail for treason after his failed takeover of the Bavarian state government.
The inflammatory tract sets out the political doctrine he enacted as Fuehrer: annexing neighboring countries to gain "Lebensraum" or "living space" for Germans, and his hatred of Jews, which led to the Holocaust.
The limited edition sold Friday is a 354-page volume II of the manifesto, printed by the Nazi Party's publishers Verlag Franz Eher in Munich, 1927.
New copies of Mein Kampf were printed in Germany in January for the first time since World War II, unsettling some Jewish community leaders, after its copyright expired.
For 70 years, Bavarian authorities refused to allow it to be republished out of respect for victims of the Nazis and to prevent incitement of hatred.
In February 2014, two rare copies of "Mein Kampf" signed by a young Hitler sold at auction in Los Angeles for $64,850.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Director General of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, recently said that the new edition of the Nazi dictator's autobiography has become a best-seller in Germany.
AFP contributed to this report.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)