Russia bans book on Hitler saying Nazi quotes insult
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian court has banned a book about Adolf Hitler by late British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, saying quotes attributed to the Nazi leader insult Russians and Jews, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Under anti-extremism laws the court banned the 1953 book "Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944", which records Hitler's sometimes racist ramblings on a wide range of topics.
Trevor-Roper, Regis professor of history at Oxford University between 1957 and 1980, wrote what is considered one of the classic accounts of the fall of Nazi Germany: "The Last Days of Hitler".
Russia's Prosecutor-General said in a statement that texts published in "Hitler's Table Talk" are of "an anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic character".
"A host of statements by A. Hitler in the book insult the dignity of Russian and Jewish peoples who are presented in quotes as inferior and primitive people because of their nationality."
The Prosecutor-General said certain Hitler quotes in the book -- such as "Russians are beasts," "Slavs are a mass of inborn slaves" -- had caused offence.
The book will now be put on a national list of extremist works that are banned and owning or distributing it would then be illegal.
Trevor-Roper, one of the leading scholars of his generation, became Lord Dacre after being made a life peer in 1987. He died in 2003.
Initially an expert on the 16th and 17th centuries, he drew on information gained while serving as an intelligence officer in World War Two to write "The Last Days of Hitler", considered a classic of Hitler scholarship.
His reputation took a knock in 1983 when he was briefly taken in by diaries purportedly written by Hitler that turned out to be forgeries.
(Editing by Stephen Weeks)
