Reddit reviews Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

This story seems nearly identical to a post on CII three months ago about another book called Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky. Here's my reply to that post -- note the same storyline:

So, this youtuber is claiming the book was classified in 1966, then in 2013 a sanitized version was released which had been cut down to 57 pages, and then it was declassified in 2016?

I don't understand this at all.

Here's a book review about Worlds in Collision from April 2, 1950. Review aside, it says the book is 401 pages long.

According to Wikipedia, the book was published the following day, April 3rd, and "...was an instant New York Times bestseller, topping the charts for eleven weeks while being in the top ten for twenty-seven straight weeks."

Why classify a best selling book 16 years after its publication? Did they confiscate every copy, too?

But ignoring that, if the book was classified starting in 1966, we should expect to see no other editions until the 57 page redacted version in 2013, right?

Except this used book store shows a 389 page edition from August 1977 and a 426 page edition from October 2009. How were two completely different companies publishing a classified document?

Unless I'm missing something, I'm calling bullshit. The theory itself sounds like any number of "world ice"-like theories that were coming out of Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. Hitler's Monsters goes into pretty comprehensive detail about the pseudoscience that was popular at the time. You can also see variations of this in assorted occult circles, though each one varies according to whatever message was channeled by the fashionable cult leader at the time.

And the wikipedia article I linked to above notes:

>More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice core studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok cores), bristlecone pine tree ring data, Swedish clay varves, and many hundreds of cores taken from ocean and lake sediments from all over the world has ruled out any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the Late Holocene age.[32] Also, the fossils, geological deposits, and landforms in Earth in Upheaval, which Velikovsky regards as corroborating the hypothesis presented in Worlds in Collision have been, since their publication, explained in terms of mundane noncatastrophic geologic processes.[33][34] So far, the only piece of the geologic evidence which has shown to have a catastrophic origin is a "raised beach" containing coral-bearing conglomerates found at an elevation of 1,200 feet above sea level within the Hawaiian Islands. The sediments, which were misidentified as a "raise beach", are now attributed to megatsunamis generated by massive landslides created by the periodic collapse of the sides of the islands.[35][36] In addition, these conglomerates, as many of the items cited as evidence for his ideas in Earth in Upheaval are far too old to be used as valid evidence supporting the hypothesis presented in Worlds in Collision.[35][37]

EDIT: This article, which is much more sympathetic to Velikovsky than most sources, states:

>Soon after publication of the book, certain of Velikovsky’s “prognostications” began to be affirmed, if not always for the precise reasons offered by Velikovsky. For example, the controversial outlook Velikovsky held on the role of electromagnetism in the interaction of planetary bodies – the one that had been at first opposed by Einstein – was upheld by the incidental discovery of radio emissions from Jupiter and acceptance based on work by Van Allen of the existence of a significant magnetic field surrounding the Earth. By the 1960’s, Velikovsky was considered a credible enough authority on questions of astronomy to be hired by a leading television network to consult and comment during NASA’s live Moon landings. In 1974, a symposium of scientists (including Velikovsky) was held in San Francisco to debate Velikovsky’s theories that ended up pitting several leading critics against Velikovsky. The official “spin” coming out of that conference – and the impression left on the general public – was that Velikovsky’s theories had been finally and definitively disproved.

If the book was classified, it seems unlikely that a symposium of scientists would then be publicly debating its contents less than a decade after the CIA classified it.