Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany since the end of World War ll.

The impending German publication of Mein Kampf isn't the first attempt at putting Hitler's words into context.

In the near future Germans will once again be able to read Mein Kampf. It will also be taught in schools. This time – unlike its original publication in the 1920s – it will be balanced with annotations correcting the errors of its author, one Adolf Hitler.

Since 1945, when the war ended and Hitler took his own life, copyright in the rancorous tirade has been held by the Bavarian government, which had until now shown no signs of allowing its publication. The copyright expires in 2015 and with tracts of Kampf appearing on the internet, the Germans have taken the imitative and decided to publish.

But should they have done so?

Yes.

Mein Kampf now is a historical document.  Hitler dictated his malformed views to two willing stenographers (one of them being Rudolf Hess) while he was incarcerated for the failed Munich putsch of 1923. The book was published in two volumes over the subsequent years. It was not a success. It is estimated only 30,000 copies had been sold by 1930.

With Hitler's rise to power so, too, did the book take on an insidious life of its own. At the time of Hitler becoming chancellor in 1933, 850,000 copies had been published; upon his death there were 8 million in circulation, of which 75 per cent had been bought by the government. Every newlywed couple in the Reich was given a copy.  It inhabited German life, from schools to household shelves. It was not so much that it was read or digested, but that it was there; much like the swastikas, salutes, uniforms  and portraits of the fuhrer.

Several years ago, a sequel to Mein Kampf was published, Hitler's Second Book. It was written in 1928, and never published in his lifetime.

This impending German publication isn't, however, the first attempt at putting Hitler's words into context. In 1939, American publishers Houghton Miflin published Mein Kampf in the US, with annotated text. Almost 250,000 copies were sold in the subsequent three years. My copy was owned by one Charles Herman Davis, 2106 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut. Mr Davis dated it Saturday, August 7, 1943. The tide in the war had by then started to turn towards the Allies.

In its introduction, the publishers write: "Mein Kampf is a propagandistic essay by a violent partisan. As such it often warps historical truth and sometimes ignores it completely. We have, therefore, felt it our duty to accompany the text with factual information which constitutes an extensive critique of the original. Large portions of Mein Kampf are devoted to the question of race as a substructure on which to erect an anti-Semitic policy. We have not let these passages go unchallenged."

If left unchallenged, books such as this vile, odious tome can be weapons. The malignity of Hitler's hatred, the hideous strain of loathing that ran through his veins, are given free rein in those two volumes. The haters of the world, Nazis, neo-Nazis, bigots of large and small hatreds, take succour from seeing a common view in print. It legitimizes the evil they do. One didn't need to read it through for it to be a propaganda tool. Its existence did that.

The news that Mein Kampf will be published in Germany has drawn mixed response. Agence France Press reported Deidre Berger, of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin saying that "we shouldn't underestimate the potential danger to this day of this book". It "presented a genocidal theory that was then enacted and the book continues to exert a horrible attraction for many young people and that's why it's very important to consider the context in which it's available and to shape that context".

Other members of the Jewish community in Germany said it was important to bring to the light the nonsense Hitler wrote and show it and Hitler for what they were: the rantings of a criminal.

In the decades after the war, Germany struggled to look into the darkness of the Reich era. The calling to account was a traumatic rendering of the nation's generations. Gradually that necessary confrontation, and acceptance, of what had gone before has been achieved. The past is now not a what if? It is, What has.

Hitler was a genius at oratory. He could, and did, transfix audiences. But Hitler is dead, and his words do not live on. They are like insects pinned to an exhibition casing. We should study them, and know them for what they are: the draining of the soul, the poisoning of the mind. Mein Kampf was a roadmap to destruction, misery, death, cruelty, torture and genocide involving tens of millions of people. It cannot now be reawakened, but in the country of its author, and elsewhere, it should be revisited.