A British publisher who planned to sell extracts of Adolf Hitler's political manifesto Mein Kampf on the streets of Germany has backed down.

The state of Bavaria, which owns the copyright to the book, had threatened legal action if publisher Peter McGee sold pamphlets containing the extracts.

Mr McGee sells reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers along with historians' analysis of their content.

He will now render Hitler's text illegible when his pamphlets are sold.

Mr McGee publishes newspapers from 1933-45 in the form of a magazine called "Zeitungszeugen" (which roughly translates as "newspaper witnesses").

He had planned to include a supplement entitled The Unreadable Book, containing extracts from Mein Kampf along with a commentary from journalism professor Horst Poettker....