Cut-price struggle

At the height of his powers as Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler virtuously never drew a salary and the Nazi Party propaganda machine relentlessly publicised this fact to show how the Führer put the interests of his country before his own. This was eyewash, of course, not least because he earned hefty royalties from sales of his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the main buyers of the book were the government and the party to distribute as gifts. Interestingly, the book is still in print today, but had he been alive, he wouldn't have earned much from it. A mint-new paperback version brought out by a Syria-based publisher costs just Rs 139.