The diary of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda, is a unique look inside the Nazi war machine. It's also copyrighted, and a German court ruled on Thursday that his estate must be paid royalties by Random House, which published a 2010 biography using parts of the diary.
The biography was written by Peter Longerich in German and re-published in English earlier this year by Penguin Random House UK. The lawsuit was brought by Cordula Schacht, the daughter of Hitler's minister of economics, on behalf of the Goebbels estate. According to Newsweek Europe, which reported the Goebbels win on Saturday, it isn't even completely clear who the estate is. It's thought to consist of the direct descendants of Goebbels' four siblings since Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide in May 1945, killing their own six children beforehand.
The diaries, kept from 1923 until Goebbel's death, "are one of the most significant sources of the internal workings of the Nazi political machine ever discovered," Newsweek writes. They were copied to microfilm in 1945, buried to avoid destruction, and ultimately discovered in 1992 in Moscow. The work was found in archives that were opened up after the fall of the USSR.
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