A long and somewhat disturbing article in the Boston Globe:

What do you do with the devil’s lucre?

 

That’s the question Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has been grappling with for more than 80 years, as it has quietly disbursed the royalties and profits from “Mein Kampf,” the infamous screed Adolf Hitler composed while in prison following the failed beer hall putsch of 1923.

 

For the past 16 years, the publisher, which first printed the book in the United States in 1933, has addressed the question by donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in proceeds from its sale to groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and Facing History and Ourselves — specialized organizations that have used the funds as a sort of direct moral equalizer, putting them toward Holocaust education or programs that combat anti-Semitism.

 

Recently, however, the company has quietly decided to change course, shifting its grant-making focus from programs explicitly related to Holocaust awareness and Jewish education to those that promote tolerance more generally. This delicate pivot has become even more complicated locally, as the publishing house has sought to focus the book’s proceeds in Boston, inviting a handful of area institutions to propose projects for funding. At least one — Boston Children’s Museum — has said no, discomfited by the Hitler connection.

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To read the rest, click on the link.