An academic edition of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" will be published in Poland this week for the first time, with its editor responding to critics by calling it "a homage to the victims", AFP reports.
"According to the critics, the publication of this book is an offense to the victims of Nazism. In my view, it is the opposite," said the editor, Eugeniusz Krol, a historian who has been preparing the Polish-language edition for the past three years.
Krol told AFP that the annotated Polish-language edition of Hitler’s book, which runs to 1,000 pages in total, would act as "a historical source in a wider context".
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.
New copies of Mein Kampf were printed in Germany in 2016 for the first time since World War II, unsettling some Jewish community leaders, after its copyright expired.
In February 2014, two rare copies of "Mein Kampf" signed by a young Hitler sold at auction in Los Angeles for $64,850.
Two years later, a copy of the book owned by the Nazi leader himself and found in his Munich apartment sold for $20,655 in the United States.
Last year, Amazon banned the sale of most editions of “Mein Kampf” and other Nazi propaganda books from its store following decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities.