When Peter McGee was barred from reprinting Nazi newspapers and “Mein Kampf” a few years ago, the law that ultimately kept him from using the material wasn’t aimed at restricting hate speech. It was German copyright protections.

“We did not anticipate the draconian stance they took,” said McGee, managing director of Albertas Limited, a British publisher that was making a magazine series about World War II for sale in Germany. “It seemed a terrible overreaction.”

While Nazi propaganda is available in many countries, German officials have used intellectual-property law to limit circulation of “Mein Kampf,” Nazi films, and books and newspapers from the era. That tool will soon disappear: Copyrights in Germany expire after 70 years, so by next year most of the material will be in the public domain.

Concerned about a wave of reprints, German officials are seeking new ways of limiting publication of the virulently anti-Semitic writings of Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen like Heinrich Himmler — who also committed suicide in 1945 — and Julius Streicher — who was executed in 1946.

Since the war, most of the rights have been held by the government of Bavaria. The state got assets of top Nazis — Hitler was a registered resident of Bavaria — as well as publishing house Eher-Verlag, which distributed Nazi newspapers.

Limiting Dissemination

Over the years, Bavaria has tried to “prevent further spread of Nazi thought,” said Horst Wolf, a spokesman for the state’s Finance Ministry. “It’s our responsibility to victims of the Nazi regime.”

While there hasn’t been a blanket ban, the Bavarians and the Murnau-Stiftung — a government-backed film foundation that holds the rights to Third Reich movies — have sought to control presentation of the material. The Bavarians have tolerated some annotated publications of excerpts from “Mein Kampf.” In the 1990s they didn’t stop comedian Serdar Somuncu, who satirized the book by simply reading it on stage. About 40 of the most notorious films such as “Jud Süß” (The Jew Suess) and “The Rothschilds” can only be screened when accompanied by lectures in a setting approved by the foundation.

With copyright enforcement no longer an option, justice ministers in Bavaria and other German states expect to keep a lid on publications by invoking rules against hate crimes and Nazi symbols. The problem is that those rules require law-enforcement agencies to decide whether a book is meant to incite racial hatred or can be deemed art, legitimate academic research, or journalism. Copyright rules, by contrast, can be applied much more broadly.

Obsolete Rules

Scholars say the restrictions have outlived their usefulness because the material is readily available. “Jud Süß” and similar films are on YouTube. Archive.org, a website based in the U.S., offers “Mein Kampf” in German and other languages, which the Bavarians can’t stop because the book was licensed to the U.S. and the U.K. during the Nazi era. Old copies of the book aren’t hard to find in Germany at antiquarian booksellers.

“It’s a totally paternalistic attitude to think you must protect the people from dangerous writings,” said Barbara Zehnpfennig, a political-science professor at Passau University. “Coyright law is aimed at protecting the author, but the Bavarians are using it to protect the audience from the author.”

Annotated Edition

One idea for controlling the debate was a critical edition of “Mein Kampf” by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, a research center that studies the Third Reich. It was hoped that the annotated edition might prevent neo-Nazi groups from filling the void with their own publications.

Two years ago, though, Bavarian officials decided a state-backed edition of “Mein Kampf” would be inappropriate and halted their cooperation with the institute. The group now plans to publish it on its own after the copyright lapses next year.

British publisher McGee, meanwhile, in 2009 won a ruling against Bavaria allowing him to reprint newspapers that were published more than 70 years earlier. While the Bavarians’ “position was reasonable in the post-war period and maybe in the 1970s and 1980s,” McGee said the controls no longer make sense. “In the 21st century,” he said, “it isn’t possible for the public not to have easy access to these publications.”

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