Nazi book burnings

In Dresden, on March 7 and 8, 1933, the Sturmabteilung raided a book store and a newspaper editorial office linked to the SPD. They burned magazines, newspapers, fiction, works by banned authors, as well as leaflets and files. ==Student Campaign==

Announcement On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. According to historian Karl Dietrich Bracher: [T]he exclusion of "Left", democratic, and Jewish literature took precedence over everything else. The black-lists ... ranged from Bebel, Bernstein, Preuss, and Rathenau through Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Brod, Döblin, Kaiser, the Mann brothers, Zweig, Plievier, Ossietzky, Remarque, Schnitzler, and Tucholsky, to Barlach, Bergengruen, Broch, Hoffmannsthal, Kästner, Kasack, Kesten, Kraus, Lasker-Schüler, Unruh, Werfel, Zuckmayer, and Hesse. The catalogue went back far enough to include literature from Heine and Marx to Kafka. speaking at a political rally against the Lausanne Conference (1932) Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazis to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. The DSt had contacted an official from the Propaganda Ministry to request support for their campaign, including having Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels be the main speaker at the event in Berlin. Because Goebbels had studied under several Jewish professors, and had, in the past, praised them despite his avowed antisemitism, he was afraid that speaking at the book burning would cause these past remarks to be dug up by his enemies. As a result, he did not formally accept the invitation to speak – despite his having been listed in the advance publicity – until the last moment. On the same day, the Student Union published the "Twelve Theses", a title chosen to be evocative of two events in German history: Martin Luther's burning of a papal bull when he posted his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, and the burning of a handful of items, including 11 books, at the 1817 Wartburg Festival on the 300th anniversary of Luther's burning of the bull. This was, however, a false comparison, as the "book burnings" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to suppress their content, whereas the Student Union burned tens of thousands of volumes, all they could find from a list comprising around 4000 titles. The "Twelve Theses" called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.” The burnings start member plunder the library of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Director of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. and his times''). Part of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection On 6 May 1933, the Berlin chapter of the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research). The institute's library included many thousands of volumes on sexuality and other matters relating to its work. The institute also had a substantial collection of objects, photographs and documents including research, biographies and patient records. Estimates of total size vary. The looted material was witnessed by the international press being loaded on to a truck and, on 10 May, it was taken to the Bebelplatz square at the State Opera (colloquially known as Opernplatz), and burned along with volumes from elsewhere. Cultural genocide in occupied territories Among the Nazi crimes against the Polish nation was a campaign of cultural genocide that included the burning of millions of books, resulting in the destruction of an estimated 80% of all school libraries, and three-quarters of all scientific libraries in the country. ==Persecuted authors==

Among the other German-speaking authors whose books student leaders burned were: Vicki Baum, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Boas, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Etta Federn, Lion Feuchtwanger, Marieluise Fleißer, Leonhard Frank, Sigmund Freud, Iwan Goll, Jaroslav Hašek, Werner Hegemann, Hermann Hesse, Ödön von Horvath, Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Franz Kafka, Georg Kaiser, Alfred Kerr, Egon Kisch, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Lessing, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Karl Liebknecht, Georg Lukács, Rosa Luxemburg, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, Robert Musil, Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph Roth, Nelly Sachs, Felix Salten, Anna Seghers, Abraham Nahum Stencl, Carl Sternheim, Bertha von Suttner, Ernst Toller, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Grete Weiskopf, and Arnold Zweig. Not only German-speaking authors were burned, but also American writers such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Margaret Sanger; as well as Russian authors including Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Majakovskij and Leon Trotsky. The burning of the books represents a culmination of the persecution of those authors whose oral or written opinions were opposed to Nazi ideology. Many artists, writers and scientists were banned from working and publication. Their works could no longer be found in libraries or in the curricula of schools or universities. Some of them were driven to exile (such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, Walter Mehring, and Arnold Zweig); others were deprived of their citizenship (for example, Ernst Toller and Kurt Tucholsky) or forced into a self-imposed exile from society (e.g., Erich Kästner). For other writers the Nazi persecutions ended in death. Some of them died in concentration camps, due to the consequences of the conditions of imprisonment, or were executed (like Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam, Gertrud Kolmar, Jakob van Hoddis, Paul Kornfeld, Arno Nadel, Georg Hermann, Theodor Wolff, Adam Kuckhoff, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, and Rudolf Hilferding). Exiled authors despaired and died by suicide, for example: Walter Hasenclever, Ernst Weiss, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, and Stefan Zweig. ==Responses==

Helen Keller published an "Open Letter to German Students", in which she wrote: "You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on." German Freedom Library On 10 May 1934, one year after the mass book burnings, the German Freedom Library founded by Alfred Kantorowicz was opened to assemble copies of the books that had been destroyed. Because of the shift in political power and the blatant control and censorship demonstrated by the Nazi Party, 1933 saw a “mass exodus of German writers, artists, and intellectuals". They went into exile in America, England, and France. On 10 May 1934, those writers in exile in France came together and established the Library of the Burned Books where all the works that had been banned, burned, censored, and destroyed were collected. The library had as its aim to "gather as many books as can be secured by authors whose books were burned by the Nazi Government at the notable bonfire on 10 May 1933. Also included were general titles relating to "general Jewish interest, in English, Hebrew and Yiddish." Among the authors whose books were available upon the library's opening were Albert Einstein, Maxim Gorki, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and many others. The library was a strong advocate for the cause of Zionism, the Jewish national movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. To the minds of those in charge of the library, the Nazi book burnings represented "proof of [the] urgency" of Zionist affairs. a collection of thousands of news clippings about events related to the Holocaust, certain trends became apparent. The United States’ reporting on the book burnings peaked after the May 10, 1933, Berlin burning but varied in coverage and approach. Publications from urban areas like the Miami Herald, Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Philadelphia Inquirer, leaned towards a more critical stance on the book burnings and Nazi regime. The Miami Herald’s article by Walt Lippman denoted the Nazi regime as “violent in its character” and claimed that the destruction of intellectual property was an ominous sign of the Nazis’ preparation for war. The Honolulu Bulletin commented that Hitler’s attempt to eradicate everything non-German would be fruitless as similar attempts had failed in other “kingdoms.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, unusually, advocated wide-scale protest against the Nazi regime and its book burnings. On the other hand, the trends that appeared in rural and suburban area reporting appeared to be less critical of the Third Reich. Instead they were more wary and angered at the burning of US authors. This was seen in the Wilmington Morning News, The Ogden Utah Examiner and the Evening Herald Courier of Bristol Tennessee.  The Tennessee newspaper described the event in a very straightforward manner, calling Goebbels the “minister of enlightenment.” Similarly, the Delaware Morning News described the behavior of the Germans as “childish.” ==Allied censorship during de-Nazification==

In 1946, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed. A representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings. However "most observers condemned the order as a piece of unenforceable foolishness". ==Memorials==

A memorial to the book burnings stands at Bebelplatz in Berlin. The work, titled The Empty Library and created by Israeli artist Micha Ullman in 1995, consists of an underground room filled with empty bookshelves, visible through a glass pane set into the square. It marks the site where thousands of books were burned on 10 May 1933. Two bronze plaques are also set into the pavement at Bebelplatz near the memorial. They bear Heinrich Heine’s warning from 1820: Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people. and inaugurated in 2021 at Königsplatz. It presents the names of authors whose works were banned or targeted for destruction in 1933. Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings was a traveling exhibition that was produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2014 the exhibition was displayed in West Fargo, North Dakota; Dallas, Texas; and Missoula, Montana. ==In popular culture==

The 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade portrays a fictional Nazi book-burning rally in Berlin. Set at the Institute of Aryan Culture in 1938, the event is attended by Adolf Hitler himself, and symbolizes the ideological opposition between Indiana Jones and his enemies, the Nazis. ==See also==