The Book Burning

Book Burnings took place in Germany shortly after the Nazi’s came to power. In May and June of 1933, the SA, SS and National Socialist German Students’ League went through libraries gathering ‘ungermanic’ works of literature. Egged on by Joseph Goebbels they sought to purify the arts and literature worlds, to be a more accurate reflection of their Aryan ideal. In Berlin, thousands of books written by Bolsheviks, Jews and other undesirables were collated in Berlin’s Opera Square where they were ceremoniously piled high and burnt. The destruction of these works of art was witnessed by many people, including Louis P. Lochner, a reporter for the Associated Press. His account of the Book Burning is below.

The Book Burning: Report by Louis P. Lochner, Head of the Berlin Bureau of the Associated Press (May 10, 1933)

The civilized world was shocked when on the evening of 10 May 1933 the books of authors displeasing to the Nazis, including even those of our own Helen Keller, were solemnly burned on the immense Franz Josef Platz between the University of Berlin and the State Opera on Unter den Linden. I was a witness to the scene.

All afternoon Nazi raiding parties had gone into public and private libraries, throwing on to the streets such books, as Dr. Goebbels in his supreme wisdom had decided were unfit for Nazi Germany. From the streets Nazi columns of beer-hall fighters had picked up these discarded volumes and taken them to the square above referred to.

Here the heap grew higher and higher, and every few minutes another howling mob arrived, adding more books to the impressive pyre. Then, as night fell, students from the university, mobilized by the little doctor, performed veritable Indian dances and incantations as the flames began to soar skyward. When the orgy was at its height, a cavalcade of cars drove into sight. It was the Propaganda Minister himself, accompanied by his bodyguard and a number of fellow torchbearers of the new Nazi Kultur. ‘Fellow students, German men and women!’ he cried as he stepped before a microphone for all Germany to hear him. ‘The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit. [ . . . ] You are doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames at this late hour of the night. It is a strong, great and symbolic act, an act that is to bear witness before all the world to the fact that the spiritual foundation of the November Republic has disappeared. From these ashes there will arise the phoenix of a new spirit. [ . . . ] The past is lying in flames. The future will rise from the flames within our own hearts. [ . . . ] Brightened by these flames our vow shall be: The Reich and the Nation and our Führer Adolf Hitler: Heil! Heil! Heil!

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Weimar and Nazi Germany – Rise of the Nazi Party – Appeasement: Source Material – Source Analysis Lesson: Nazi Methods of Control – Revision Guide, Weimar and Nazi Germany