I had a copy as, in its multitude of impacts, the Second World War was arguably the most momentous event in human history and if Hitler hadn't been born it would not have occurred. So I sought an explanation why the most civilised and civil people in the world succumbed to him, but Mein Kampf was not the answer and I doubt it had much impact on Germans.
So, too, before he was finally rolled, I read Gaddafi's little green book - this aping Mao's little red book, possession of both being de facto compulsory in their respectful nations. Both are rubbish and the banalities of Gaddafi's meanderings reinforced my amazement at the ability of absolute clowns to gain control of nations.
I'm a book lover and author-signed copies - of which I have hundreds - are specially treasured. In the case of the Hitler-signed Mein Kampf, Dotcom has a rare curio and one suspects if he wasn't German, Paul Thomas would not have written as he did.
The fact is books on Hitler - particularly semi-pictorial ones - sell and sell, he being of enduring fascination to the world, epitomised by the British university history teachers association bemoaning at their annual conference a few years ago that so many doctoral students wanted to write their thesis on Hitler.
Every street market and bric-a-brac shop throughout central Europe is crammed with Nazi memorabilia, I suspect much of it newly manufactured. But here's the interesting anomaly... probably if Dotcom possessed a bust or statuette of Hitler, he'd be history. So why the difference?
In my library there's a heavy brass bust of Stalin, these for sale throughout Russia and eastern Europe. It's a novelty piece sitting adjacent my Russian section's several dozen Stalin books.
Likewise a bust of Mao, available throughout China, alongside my Mao biographies.
Adjacent to my desk is a cabinet, having dictionaries, an atlas and my own books, book-ended with a 20cm-high Lenin statuette. All three were evil buggers responsible for millions of deaths and yet all are socially acceptable in the curio sense.
Not long ago in Budapest I visited an antique and bric-a-brac market and there, in the identical alloy and size to my Lenin - and probably from the same factory - was a jackbooted Hitler, perfect for the other bookend.
I didn't buy it, knowing the nonsense I'd endure - and there's the anomaly, for somehow it's a step too far. Yet it's acceptable for busloads of tourists to daily stand on the podium in Nuremburg where Hitler's rallies were held and be photographed giving a Nazi salute.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union I was in Mongolia. For six decades the Russians had banned any mention of Genghis Khan but now they were flat out Genghis Khanning at speed, on their banknotes and everywhere except postage stamps, which would be were seen abroad.
Genghis Khan united Mongolia but his fame - or, more accurately, infamy - rests on his appalling plundering and murdering for sport across Asia and Eastern Europe. For this he's a hero which Hitler most certainly isn't in Germany.
Paul's criticism of Dotcom was silly, although not the first time I've encountered such irrational connectivity.
Once, at a dinner party at a likeable lefty academic's home, I remarked on him only having four of Waugh's novels.
"I know," he sighed. "But he was such a shit." Which in many ways he was.
On another occasion, also a dinner party, I remarked on Graham Greene's latest novel and was promptly condemned by a well-known broadcaster for reading a Catholic writer.
Should we not read Sir Vidia Naipaul for his undisguised contempt for what, in private, he calls "niggers"? Should we condemn police museums for their macabre collection of murders' relics? To do so would reflect closed minds... tantamount to book-burning.
