FIRST ISSUE of THE XXTH CENTURY MAGAZINE - A SHANGHAI Based NAZI Financed Periodical. Edited by Klaus Mehnert.

SHANGHAI: The XXth Century Publishing Company / Klaus Mehnert, October 1941. First Issue - Vol. I, No. 1.

The XXth Century was an English language, Nazi financed, deceptively scholarly publication about China, Japan, Asia, Germany, and World War II. It had a strong pro-Axis slant, but presented itself as an independent publication filled with articles about Asia and the World. German activities in the War and throughout the world were portrayed in a positive light.

Softcover magazine, 7.5x10 inches (18.5x25.5 cm), 80 pages, illustrated with photographic plates and in-text drawings. Laid-in at the front is a single sheet announcing this "New Magazine".

GOOD CONDITION: the covers have some soiling, light wear to the spine ends and spine folds, a faint signature on the front cover, and paperclip indents and associated creases to the rear cover and the last few pages; internally, the pages are tight, bright, clean, clear and unmarked.

The Berlin State Library called The XXth Century "particularly remarkable because it is completely free of Nazi propaganda." Far from the truth.

THE FIRST ISSUE OF THIS

About KLAUS MEHNERT and the XXTH CENTURY magazine (from Wikipedia and the University of Hawaii website):

******Born In Moscow in 1906, Mehnert's family left Russia in 1914. He received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1928. Mehnert was fluent in Russian, German, and English. He married Enid Keyes (d.1955) in California in 1933, and in 1934 returned to the Soviet Union as an author and German newspaper reporter. In 1936 Goebbels ordered German newspapers to stop printing Mehnert's news reports, so he moved to America where he taught at UC Berkeley then at the University of Hawaii.

In June 1941, six months prior to America's entry to World War II, he left for Shanghai, China, where he published an English language journal The XXth Century with financing from the Nazi German Foreign Ministry and Joseph Goebbels' Third Reich Propaganda Ministry.

The XXth Century was an influential promoter of anti-Allied reports and commentary in Asia, The XXth Century was later described by American intelligence as "one of the slickest bits of propaganda work that has been done anywhere". In its four years, Menhert "steered his publication cunningly along a sophisticated path that eschewed overt pro-Axis advocacy", according to the British historian Bernard Wasserstein, with "a wide range of contributors, few of whom were publicly identified with Nazism". The journal was discontinued at the end of the war in 1945, and Mehnert was briefly imprisoned before returning to Germany.

Following the end of WWII Mehnert returned to Germany where he taught, published, and advised the government on Sino-Russian matters. The German historian Norbert Frei described Mehnert as "one of the adaptable Former Ones".

Klaus Mehnert died in 1984 at the age of 77 in Freudenstadt, West Germany.******

About Klaus Mehnert and his XXth Century magazine (from a 2015 blog post):

******Nazi Propaganda in Shanghai - The XXth Century Magazine.

Shanghai's Book Mart bookstore, patronized almost exclusively by Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers during the 1940s, had one particular regular visitor, Dr Klaus Menhert, who was perhaps the most able of the Nazi propagandists working in Shanghai during World War Two.******