One of the strangest and most fascinating moments of the literary world in 2016 will come almost immediately after the calendar turns, on Jan. 1, when the 70-year-old German copyright on Hitler’s Mein Kampf finally expires. The book, whose title is usually translated as “My Struggle” in English, is part memoir and part manifesto, and was first published in two editions in 1925 and 1926. As you might guess, it’s an intensely anti-Semitic work, and it lays the groundwork for the atrocities that Hitler would commit as the head of Nazi Germany years later. When he committed suicide in 1945 at the end of World War II, the copyright for the book defaulted to the German state of Bavaria for a standard period of 70 years. The book was banned in Germany, and Bavaria refused to consider any kind of republication during that period.

At 12:00 a.m. on Jan. 1, that 70-year copyright comes to an official end, and Mein Kampf will belong to the public domain. A week later, on Jan. 8, a new academic version of the text will be released, with more than 3,500 “footnotes and comments” that attempt to provide context and factual corrections to Hitler’s words, and which push the full text to more than 2,000 pages. The Institute of Contemporary History in Munich is responsible for the work, which will be available for around 40 pounds in the UK, but will not be sold online.

The response to the new publication has been mixed. The effort to add context is appreciated, but there are worries that the availability of Hitler’s text could add fuel to the fire of right wing nationalism that is currently experiencing a revival in western Europe. In the UK, The Guardian reports, the Jewish community is greeting the news with tenuous approval:

Senior figures in Britain’s Jewish community have cautiously welcomed the republication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for the first time since the second world war…

Just under two weeks from the new edition’s launch in Munich, Richard Verber, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the board had faith in the academic and educational worth of the exercise. “We would, of course, be very wary of any attempt to glorify Hitler or to belittle the Holocaust in any way,” Verber told the Observer. “But this is not that. I do understand how some Jewish groups could be upset and nervous, but it seems it is being done from a historical point of view and to put it in context,” he said.

“The key is that the notes to the text really do refute Hitler’s ideas with factual information. If that were not the case, the board of deputies would be worried. But the fact remains Hitler is one of the most famous, or infamous, leaders of the 20th century and anything that might put a dampener on that, by showing his views in a historical light, might actually be helpful.”

In a column for the Daily Telegraph last week, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, expressed sympathy with [Jewish] opposition, but wrote: “My principles tell me that republishing it is fine. At the very least, Mein Kampf is – obviously – an important historical work … Ideas, however awful, cannot be locked away. They have to be defeated.”

Reactions from the German Jewish community have been less sympathetic, with some arguing that the mere appearance of the ideas implies a sort of acceptance, even with annotations. Some leaders even call it “too dangerous for the general public.”

Mein Kampf is widely available outside Germany, where it can be bought online, in bookstores, and even in libraries. In the United States, the copyright was seized by the U.S. government during the war, and bought back by Houghton Mifflin in 1979. The company has donated all profits from sales of the book since that time (about 15,00 copies per year) to charity.