Munich's Institute of Contemporary History has announced plans to publish an annotated edition of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in January, 2016.At the end of 2015, 70 years after World War II and Hitler's death, the copyright on the book expires - a copyright currently held by the German state of Bavaria as the legal successor to the erstwhile Nazi publishing house Franz Eher Verlag.The new two-volume edition will be up to 2,000 pages long, the Institute's deputy director Magnus Brechtken said.Of that, 780 pages will be from the original 27-chapter version of Hitler's propaganda work. The remaining pages will contain up to 5,000 scholarly commentaries as well as an introduction and index.The project has been under way for a number of years and is in the final phases, Brechtken said.In 2012 Bavaria announced that it would back an annotated edition of the book with 500,000 euros (570,000 dollars). But after the state Premier Horst Seehofer paid a visit to Israel he changed his position, making the surprise announcement that Bavaria would no longer financially support the project.He said at the time that Bavarian financing of the project did not sit well with legal attempts to ban the (neo-Nazi) NPD party.At the Institute, Brechtken stressed: "We work independently. We are a scientific research institute."In the summer of 2014, the justice ministers of Germany's federal states agreed that the distribution of any non-annotated editions of Mein Kampf should continue to be prohibited in Germany after the copyright expired.There was to be no special legislation, the ministers agreed, arguing that current German laws banning incitement of ethnic hatred were sufficient to continue the ban on the book.The justice ministers did not comment explicitly about annotated editions or the years of scholarly work by the Institute.A spokeswoman for the Bavarian state justice ministry said that if an edition contains scholarly comments that clearly distance themselves from the original work's content, then it would be possible to publish the work without punishment. But this must be judged in each individual case and with the annotated text being judged by the courts."We want to surround Hitler," is what the Institute's director Andreas Wirsching said of the situation last year."What we will be bringing out is an anti-Hitler work."He conceded that it is difficult to explain to victims of the Nazi Holocaust - the attempt to wipe out Europe's Jews - why Mein Kampf should be published in Germany again.But he said: "A ban is nothing more than a symbolic policy. And (it would be) a symbolic policy in the wrong place because it only serves to add to the mystification of this book."