Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Do you really believe this, or are you exaggerating for effect?
A German court did rule for the Goebbels estate over Random House in 2015.
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Well,
of course I was exaggerating. Though the Goebbels case must have been very hard for the poor judges, since they had to decide between Big Money and old Nazi heirs from banker stock, both groups dear to a German judge's hearts. So that time the second, older love won out, probably out of pity because the old Nazi daughter's claims*) were so dodgy anyway.
According to his own diary, Goebbels himself had sold the rights to his diaries to the Nazi party's publishing house in 1936. He received 250,000 Reichsmarks at once and 100,000 yearly - five times his minister's salary. After the end of the Third Reich, the state of Bavaria became the rightful owner of the copyright, just like for Hitler's
Mein Kampf, but for some reason they never enforced it. In 1955 some Goebbels relatives sold the rights to Goebbels' works (which they never had for the diaries) to a Swiss banker and Nazi, who successfully claimed copyright from then on. Never underestimate old Nazi allegiances in the German judicial system.
Source for my short summary (in German, unfortunately):
https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweit...ebuechern.html
EDIT: A footnote.
*) Cordula Schacht, daughter of former Nazi Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, who represented the estate of the Swiss Nazi banker who had bought the rights to Goebbels' works in 1955.
EDIT: I had originally written that Goebbels had sold the rights to all his works. But he only sold the rights to his diaries. I have corrected that, and added that this fact is according to his own diary entry. The contracts were lost, unfortunately, and that is probably how that horrible Swiss Nazi banker, Francois Genoud, managed to cash in on them for decades.