The 1933 Book Burnings

The public burning of "un-German" books by members of the SA and university students on the Opernplatz in Berlin. May 10, 1933

By: Dr. Frances G. Sternberg, MCHE 

On the night of May 10, 1933, less than six months after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power, right-wing students in 34 university towns across Germany marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit” and called for Nazi officials, university faculty and chaplains, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. Then, singing songs and taking “fire oaths” as band music played, in large open-air bonfires, the students burned thousands of “un-German books,” taken in raids on public and university libraries, private collections, and bookstores. The events also received widespread media attention – not only newspaper coverage, but also “live” radio broadcasts of the songs and speeches.

These seemingly “spontaneous” demonstrations were actually carefully orchestrated by Josef Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, as part of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (“synchronization”), which sought to align all elements of German society, polity, and culture with Nazi ideology by purging them of Jews and those considered “politically suspect” and by defining their work as “degenerate.” 

This policy was fully supported by “National Socialist German Students Association” (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or NSDStB). After World War I, the membership of numerous secular student organizations was largely ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative and antisemitic; and in the 1920s, university students were among the Nazis’ earliest and most fervent supporters, using Nazism to express their discontent and hostility to the Weimar Republic and playing key roles in Nazi activities. 

The NSDStB also played a key role in the book burnings. On April 6, 1933, the NSDStB Office for Press and Propaganda called for a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit” on May 10 that would end in “cleansing” (Säuberung) by fire. Local NSDStB chapters provided newspaper articles and press releases, bought radio air time, sponsored Nazi officials as public speakers, and – most critically – supplied lists of “un-German” authors. On April 8, claiming that the “Action” would affirm traditional “German values” in the face of a global Jewish “smear campaign” against Germany, the students’ association unveiled its “12 Theses” – a mission statement for the demonstrations – that asserted the need to “purify” German language and literature, attacked “Jewish intellectualism,” and demanded that universities serve as centers of German nationalism. 

In this context, on May 10, more than 25,000 books were burned: books by authors considered “socialists” and “communists” such as Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx; books by critical “bourgeois” writers like Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler; anti-fascist critics like Nobel laureate Thomas Mann; books by anti-war proponents like Erich Maria Remarque who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front; books by “corrupting foreign influences” like Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Helen Keller, whose commitment to social justice made her a champion for the disabled, for pacifism, for improved conditions for industrial workers, and for women's suffrage; and books by Jewish authors, many of whom were among the most famous writers of the day, such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Stefan Zweig. 

Also among those works were burned was the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who was born Jewish but who had converted to Christianity and who in 1821 had written – so presciently – the often quoted “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen": "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people." 

Click on the following links for USHMM materials:

Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings