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I had a go at identifying the copyright owner, and it depends. Goebbels had his diaries microfilmed (yes, in the early 1940s) and these were seized by the Russians in 1945, and largely forgotten until the 1990s when a western researcher tracked them down. They formed the source for the published German language edition. The complete set of published diaries, by the way, is seriously huge (29 fat volumes).
Various bits of it have been translated into English and published in the US and the UK. If I were the translator, and anyone wanted to lift chunks out of the English language edition, representing several years' of my work, for free, I'd certainly be seeking out m'learned friends.
As to the copyright owner of the German language edition, it seems to have been commissioned by the German government because of its enormous historical wealth of inside reports on meetings, conferences, conversations, and so on. It sounds like a government to government deal to me (Germany-Russia) but details are obscure.
Oddly enough, according to Mr Wiki and Mr Pedia, sections of his diaries were published in English well before that, from the surviving actual books, a very incomplete set, which had been stored in the Reich Chancellery and captured as well.
So while the legal copyright holder of the German text is obscure, but almost certainly Government, the translators have a perfectly valid and proper reason to beef if a large percentage of the projected book is, as some seem to think, extracts from the translations. (After all, the English language translation copyrights do not expire for many years yet.)
There's no doubt that the diaries are of great value to historians and researchers of the Nazi period. But they are never going to be best-sellers and make anyone a fortune in royalties. More than likely the main return to owners and translators is the payments for extracts.
Very interesting debate so far, anyway.
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