Historians have cheered news that Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" will be reprinted in Germany for the first time since the Nazi dictator's fall in 1945, just as Holocaust survivors hit out at the move.

British publisher Peter McGee said he would put out excerpts from the anti-Semitic manifesto, which laid out the Fuehrer's vision long before he took power in 1933, alongside commentary putting the work in historical context

Academics said the time had come for some of the taboos surrounding the book in Germany to fall.

"I think we have a very inhibited approach to this material in Germany. You can read this book around the world – there is even a Hebrew translation in Israel," Journalism Professor Horst Poettker, who is providing some of the annotation for the project, told AFP....