Nazi book burnings

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nazi book burnings were a campaign carried out by the German Student Union across thirty-four university towns in Germany and Austria during the 1930s. On the night of the 10th of May 1933, students marched in torchlit parades, threw piles of books onto bonfires, and listened to speeches broadcast live on the radio. Over 25,000 volumes were reduced to ash at the Bebelplatz square in Berlin alone. The works targeted included those of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Erich Maria Remarque, and Helen Keller, among dozens of others. What drove young university students to burn the libraries of their own culture? What happened to the authors whose books were fed to those flames? And why did it take a century for a proper memorial to appear in Munich?

• 2. The Campaign Begins

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  On the 8th of April 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union announced a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit". The stated goal was a literary "cleansing" by fire. Local chapters were instructed to supply the press with releases, sponsor prominent Nazi speakers at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time.

  The campaign was given ideological framing through the publication of the "Twelve Theses", which called for a "pure" national language and culture. The students described the coming action as a response to what they called a worldwide smear campaign against Germany. The theses attacked what they labeled "Jewish intellectualism" and demanded that universities become centers of German nationalism.

  The title "Twelve Theses" was chosen deliberately to echo two moments in German history: Martin Luther's protest actions in 1517 and the Wartburg Festival of 1817. That comparison was, however, false. Those earlier events involved the symbolic destruction of a single copy of a document, without any attempt to suppress the content. The Student Union's campaign targeted around 4,000 titles, aiming to burn every copy it could find.

  Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels was invited to serve as the main speaker at the Berlin event. He was reluctant to accept publicly. Because he had studied under several Jewish professors and had previously praised them despite his avowed antisemitism, he feared those remarks would be dug up by his enemies. He did not formally accept the invitation until the last moment, despite having already been listed in advance publicity.

• 3. The Night of the Fires

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  Six days before the mass burnings, on the 6th of May 1933, the Berlin chapter of the German Student Union attacked Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft - the Institute of Sex Research. The institute held many thousands of volumes on sexuality along with research materials, photographs, biographies, and patient records. Witnesses from the international press watched as the looted material was loaded onto a truck.

  On the 10th of May, that material was taken to the Bebelplatz square near the State Opera and burned along with books gathered from elsewhere. The rituals of that night were scripted. High Nazi officials, professors, university rectors, and student leaders were assigned roles to address the gathered participants. Students threw the banned books into the bonfires with what observers described as joyous ceremony, accompanied by live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations.

  In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Goebbels speak. "No to decadence and moral corruption!" he told the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kastner." His speech, broadcast on the radio, referred to the burned authors as "intellectual filth" and "Jewish asphalt literati."

  Not all the burnings happened on the 10th of May. Some were postponed because of rain. Others, by local chapter preference, took place on the 21st of June, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. In thirty-four university towns, the campaign was considered a success by its organizers. Radio broadcasts brought the ceremonies live to German listeners who were not present at the bonfires.

• 4. Who Was Targeted

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  Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher described the reach of the blacklists in terms that capture just how wide the net was cast. They ran from August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein at one end to Hermann Hesse and Heinrich Heine at the other, pulling in nearly every significant voice in German letters. The criterion was not literary quality; it was ideological incompatibility.

  The categories of banned literature spelled out by the Nazis included the works of Jewish authors regardless of the field, Marxist and communist literature, pacifist writing, liberal and democratic works, and anything that supported the Weimar Republic. Also banned were books on sexuality and sexual education, works by emigres who criticized the new Germany, and what the Nazis called "decadent" art criticism. The list even extended to what they dismissed as "patriotic kitsch."

  Non-German authors were included as well. American writers burned included John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Margaret Sanger. Russian authors on the lists included Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Maxim Gorki, and Isaac Babel. When German students ran out of books from their own libraries, they turned to independent bookstores. Libraries across the country were asked to stock only material that met Nazi standards and to destroy the rest.

  Beyond Germany, in occupied Poland, the campaign of cultural destruction was carried out on a massive scale. An estimated 80% of all school libraries in Poland were destroyed, along with three-quarters of all scientific libraries in the country. The Nazis also seized rare and ancient books from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, planning to preserve a small number as museum exhibits of a culture they intended to eliminate.

• 5. Lives Destroyed

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  For many of the authors whose books were burned, the bonfires were only the beginning. Many writers, artists, and scientists were banned from working and from publication. Their names were removed from library catalogs and university curricula.

  Some were driven into exile. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, Walter Mehring, and Arnold Zweig all left Germany. Others lost their citizenship entirely; Ernst Toller and Kurt Tucholsky were among those stripped of that status. Erich Kastner, whose name Goebbels spoke aloud at the Berlin bonfire, was forced into a self-imposed internal exile within Germany.

  For others, the outcome was death. Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Muhsam, Gertrud Kolmar, Jakob van Hoddis, Paul Kornfeld, Arno Nadel, Georg Hermann, Theodor Wolff, Adam Kuckhoff, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, and Rudolf Hilferding all died in concentration camps or were executed. The conditions of imprisonment killed some; others were directly murdered.

  Among those who had escaped abroad, despair claimed further lives. Walter Hasenclever, Ernst Weiss, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, and Stefan Zweig all died by suicide in exile. Helen Keller, whose books were also burned, published an open letter addressed directly to German students. "You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe," she wrote, "but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on."

• 6. Libraries Built in Response

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  One year after the mass burnings, on the 10th of May 1934, exiled German writers gathered in France and opened the Library of the Burned Books. Alfred Kantorowicz, who later wrote a first-hand account in a 1944 article titled "Library of the Burned Books", was one of its key leaders. The library's mission went beyond collecting banned titles. Kantorowicz described it as the "center of intellectual anti-Nazi activities" and said it maintained extensive archives on the history of Nazism and the resistance to it in all forms.

  Kantorowicz described the day of the opening in terms that still carry weight: "we wanted to make that day of shame a day of glory for literature and for freedom of thought which no tyrant could kill by fire." After France fell to German forces, the French government closed the library. Anyone associated with it was imprisoned or sent to a concentration camp. When the Nazis occupied Paris, the library and its archives were seized and destroyed.

  A parallel institution opened in New York. On the 15th of November 1934, the American Library of Nazi Banned Books was established at the Brooklyn Jewish Center in Brooklyn, New York. Its aim was to gather copies of every book burned at the Berlin bonfire of the 10th of May 1933. An inaugural dinner held on the 22nd of December 1934 was dedicated to Albert Einstein and Heinz Liepmann. Among the authors whose books were available from the opening were Einstein, Maxim Gorki, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann, whose works were part of that collection, was quoted as saying that what happened in Germany convinced him more and more of the value of Zionism for the Jewish people. The Brooklyn library remained in operation until the Brooklyn Jewish Center closed in the 1970s, at which point its collection was donated to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City.

• 7. Memory and Memorials

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  At Bebelplatz in Berlin, where over 25,000 books were burned on the 10th of May 1933, a permanent memorial now stands in the pavement. Israeli artist Micha Ullman created it in 1995. Called The Empty Library, it consists of an underground room filled with empty bookshelves, visible through a glass pane set flush with the square. Two bronze plaques nearby carry a warning written by Heinrich Heine in 1820: "Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people."

  In Munich, a second major memorial arrived much later. The Blacklist, created by Arnold Dreyblatt and inaugurated in 2021 at Konigssquare, presents the names of authors whose works were targeted in 1933. The gap of nearly ninety years between the event and the Munich memorial reflects how long it took some cities to formally confront this chapter in their histories.

  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum produced a traveling exhibition called "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings". In 2014 it was displayed in West Fargo, North Dakota; Dallas, Texas; and Missoula, Montana. The exhibition drew on the museum's History Unfolded Database, which holds thousands of news clippings about events related to the Holocaust, including American newspaper coverage of the 1933 burnings. Urban papers such as the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer were sharply critical of the Nazi regime; rural and suburban papers were often more angered by the burning of American authors than troubled by what the campaign represented. The Bebelplatz memorial remains the most visited site of conscience from that night, standing a few steps from where the flames once burned.