"Hitler Chancellor of the Reich" read the headline on Page 1 of the newspaper Der Angriff ("The Attack"), with one of the ensuing pages featuring an anti-Semitic rant by Hitler's demagogue Joseph Goebbels.

The newspaper is part of the first issue of Zeitungszeugen (German for "newspaper witnesses"), a controversial history weekly launched in early January by British publisher Peter McGee. It features authentic reprints of Nazi-era newspapers wrapped by a magazine with commentaries by leading historians and media scientists who dissect the Nazi's propaganda tricks.

The first issue, which sold exceptionally well, focused on Hitler's Jan. 30, 1933, ascent to power. It includes not only a reprint of the Nazi newspaper but also reprints of the communist daily The Fighter and of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative newspaper, thus showing how the German press reacted to Hitler's rise to power. (The communist paper warned of a dark era, calling on Germans to take the streets in protest; the conservative daily was hopeful that Germany, suffering from a recession, would see better times.)

The publisher says Zeitungszeugen is aimed at stirring a debate and giving an authentic insight into the Nazi era and its press. He argues Germans, some 65 years after the end of World War II, are ready to confront their dark past.

"From today you will have a unique opportunity to read what information was available to your grandparents and your parents," the historian and editor of the magazine, Sandra Paweronschitz, said in a statement.

But prosecutors for now have put an end to the reprints.

Last week German police followed a court order to confiscate thousands of copies of the second Zeitungszeugen issue from German newsstands, pending an investigation into whether the weekly newspaper violated copyright rules and laws banning the publication of Nazi symbols such as the swastika.

The German state of Bavaria owns publishing rights to most Nazi newspapers, and it has threatened to sue McGee. Munich argues it wants to pursue the ban because the reprints can be easily separated from the magazine. This undermines the weekly's educational purpose, Munich says. As the reprints look just as they did 60 years ago, critics fear neo-Nazis might even use them as modern-day propaganda material.

"The dissemination of Nazi propaganda is willingly accepted," Bavaria's justice minister told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

Jewish organizations, alarmed by growing numbers of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany, are also uneasy about the venture.

Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the German Central Council of Jews, said she was "doubtful" that Zeitungszeugen could positively educate a broad public.

"If only the newspapers and their Nazi propaganda are read, which are published clearly separately from the annotated commentaries, then this would be disastrous," she said in a statement. "As a Holocaust survivor, these texts for me are more than interesting historic sources. They are part of a gruesome reality that I was able to escape. Millions of other Jews were not. As a publisher, you should be aware of that."

Her council backs the ban, which McGee says is not right. The publisher claims his magazine is purely educational. It would cover the entire period of the Third Reich until the Allied victory in 1945, and also feature exiled and foreign press, as well as material from the German resistance.

The following issues of Zeitungszeugen, which will hit the newsstands Thursday, nevertheless will have to do without Nazi newspaper reprints until the legal issue is resolved.

It is the latest round in a long-running conflict in Germany about whether to keep disturbing Nazi material away from the public or publish it for educational purposes.

Wolfgang Benz, one of Germany's leading historians and the head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical University, in this particular case backs the latter -- he is part of a team of scientists advising the Zeitungszeugen project.

On Monday Benz told the foreign press corps he was able to relate to the concerns brought up by the German Central Council of Jews, but not the legal ban promoted by the Bavarian government.

McGee last year launched a similar project that reprinted Nazi newspapers in Austria, to which Munich didn't react with copyright lawsuits, Benz said.

The historian added that neo-Nazis easily could get their hands on Nazi material by simply browsing the Internet. Hitler's poorly written and outrageously repulsive pamphlet "Mein Kampf," for example, can't be printed, but can be easily bought in vintage bookstores.

Benz said banning the newspaper reprints would only serve to surround Nazi material with an aura of forbidden glamour -- just the opposite of what Bavaria wanted to achieve.

Zeitungszeugen, he added, would not help neo-Nazis, but instead serve to "educate responsible citizens" who may not be eager to delve into a history book.

"The Nazi era is not yet sufficiently dealt or coped with," Benz on Monday told the foreign press corps in Berlin. "Therefore, education needs to be ongoing."

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