The rise in book censorship across the United States is reminiscent of the fascist tendencies throughout history. While book banners and censorship supporters paint their concerns as specific to contemporary issues, it’s a common way to consolidate power. The history of Nazi book burning is one of the most obvious antecedents to the censorship of books in the U.S.

Book burning began shortly after the Nazi Party took control over the government: “Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated student groups carried out public burnings of books they claimed were “un-German.” The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities. Works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires.”

However, this was not the first time Germans had burned “un-German” books. In 1817, groups of students demonstrated their patriotism for the unification of Germany by mounting massive bonfires of books. At this time, what is now Germany was a loose collection of cities. This moment of censorship was driven by the conceptions of race and nationalism spreading across Europe.

With these ideas came the need to define what was German and what was not. Exclusion is necessary to create an enclosed nation. Part of the rhetoric of German nationalism was that all true Germans were Christian. Some German nationalists believed Jews could assimilate only if they converted. German Jewish people disagreed and fought for equal recognition under German law. Gabriel Riesser, a prominent Jewish activist during the first half of the 19th century, argued that the Jewish people’s participation in the army validated their German identity, not their faith.

The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote with chilling clairvoyance, “where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” Although Germany was officially unified in 1871, chaos and power-grabs in the form of nationalistic fervor were quick to dominate the country.

As soon as they took power in 1933, the Nazi Party swiftly enacted their agenda to enforce racist, exclusionary ideology. The Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, spearheaded this mission to “synchronize” German culture by rooting out supposed “un-German” material and stirring up nationalist fervor.

While the Nazi Party also worked to bolster their hard power with military might, the consolidation of soft power through cultural destruction was equally important. Goebbels took a broad approach to the discipline of the German people through controlling their cultural appetites. The Ministry oversaw the institution of the Hitler Youth, what foreign press was allowed and what the national press said, film censorship, and suppressing counter-propaganda. Anything that criticized the methods of the Third Reich or their policies had to be quashed or demonized.

Although Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age, the Nazi Party truly radicalized him and gave him the opportunity to enact such draconian policy. The fundamental belief of the Nazi Party was that the Jewish people (as well as other un-German forces) were the source of all of Germany’s ills. When the Nazis took power, Goebbels pushed for immediate action against the Jews, banning them from using public transport and requiring all Jewish-owned businesses to be labeled as such.

All these actions served to create a culture of fear and exclusion to support flawed idea of Aryan purity. Book burnings, visible markers of difference, and tight control of widely distributed media (like films and radio) all served the division of people living in Germany and set the stage for future inconceivably evil actions taken by the Nazi Party. Since everyone was either supportive of German purity, or too scared to speak up for fear retribution, the Nazi Party could push any policy they wanted.

Taking the time to separate German and un-German texts (even if a number of them originated in Germany) also allowed the Party to define the enemy. The un-German forces defined by the Party were texts from Jewish writers, socialist writing, anything democratic, or foreign authors.

On April 6, 1933, the Nazi German Students’ Association announced the book-burning action, which was called an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit.” German university students were early supporters of Nazi ideology in the 1920s and were eager to display their German nationalism through these censorious actions.

This was a coordinated effort on the part of the Ministry that oversaw the German Students’ Association. Local university chapters received press releases, visits from high-ranking Nazi Party members to give speeches, and radio time to publicize the action. Goebbels wanted to dominate the radio airwaves and the print press in order to consolidate soft power over the German people. He wanted them to feel justified in their outright racism in the name of German purity. The low-level buzz of German right-wing nationalism was impossible to avoid.

The German Students’ Association also drafted “12 theses,” a deliberate callback to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. The 12 theses were posted around university towns and outlined the ways in which the Nazi Party believed the Jewish people were attempting to destroy German culture. Whatever individual students may or may not have believed, the universities were pushed to act as stewards of the Nazi Party’s conception of German purity.

On May 6, 1933, the first book-burning action took place. The Institute of Sexology was targeted by German students. The library of the Institute collected over 20,000 texts about intersexuality, homosexuality, and transgender people. Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Institute, also performed the first gender confirmation surgery on Dora Richter, who died in 1933 and was most likely killed in the chaos of the book burning action. This initial step was part of the Nazi Party’s mission to ban all “deviant” sexuality.

Across the country in 34 towns with universities, students and Nazi supporters gathered to burn books. The image of the ritual is very familiar: “On the evening of May 10, in most university towns, right-wing students marched in torchlight parades ‘against the un-German spirit.’” The Charlottesville, Virginia right-wing rally of 2017 replicated this image exactly.

The book-burning in Berlin was the largest event. Goebbels spewed rhetoric of German purity to 40,000 spectators at the Opernplatz. That day, over 25,000 books were burned in total.

Before the burnings, the propaganda ministry worked with booksellers and university leaders to compile blacklists of authors who did not align with Nazi policy. Helen Keller’s books were burned not only because she lived with disabilities, but she was also a socialist and a pacifist.

Other authors on the blacklist included authors who were not born in Germany, writers who supported the Weimar Republic, Karl Marx and all other communists, socialists like Bertolt Brecht, anything written by a Jewish author, pornographic writing, or writing that advocated for a bourgeois lifestyle. The seemingly endless list of books was also taken to libraries in Poland, which were forced to only stock the “pure” German texts. Of course, the many Germans who wrote books about socialism or art or culture were not allowed in these libraries or universities anymore.

Counter-protests immediately sprang across American cities, and the American media responded with shock and warnings about what the Nazi Party would do in the future to further push for German purity. American Jewish leaders, who were attempting to sound the alarm about the Nazi Party, organized protests and marched against the “culture war” against the destruction “un-German” culture. In New York City, over 100,000 people marched in opposition to the actions of the Nazi Party.

Targeting culture is a necessity for dictatorial control. Fascist leaders seek to crush any thoughts that might encourage resistance to their regime. However, there was consistent opposition to the Nazi regime.  As Helen Keller said in her open letter to German students the day before the book burnings, “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.”

As these methods of cultural restriction rise in the U.S., it is deeply important to oppose book bannings and pay attention to what government officials mean by un-American when they choose to ban books about queer kids and racial injustice.  

The fact that state governments are choosing schools to start the book bans is also deliberate. The Nazi Party exerted control over universities and children through the Hitler Youth program in order to raise compliantly racist Germans. American schools filled with students with no knowledge of the Middle Passage, the Jim Crow era, or internment camps will pay no attention to the erosion of protections for marginalized people under federal or state law. If they know nothing about discrimination, they can’t fight it.

They’re also fed a false narrative of American exceptionalism, similar to the narratives of German purity that drove the book burnings. The news-making banning of Maus by Art Spiegelman could even preface a future in which students learn very little about the lead-up to the Holocaust and fail to recognize the signs of dictatorial cultural power.

The ideology of book burnings and bannings are obvious in their aims. Pruning away “un-American” literature is part of a concerted effort to silence dissent, crush progressive political movements, and eradicate the concept of marginalization and privilege. The most challenged books of 2021 are disturbingly similar in themes to the books Nazis wished to eradicate. Books about race, gender, and sexuality will continue to be targets. Fighting book bans is a book lover’s moral imperative.

The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (German: Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt) to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others.[1] The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky,[2] but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as in Poland.[3]

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.[4]

 

Goebbels 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.[5]

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 1520, 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.[6]

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.”

 

German students and Nazi SA members plunder the library of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Director of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin

The first large burning came on 6 May 1933. The German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (roughly: Institute of Sex Research). Its library and archives of around 20,000 books and journals were publicly hauled out and burned in the street. Its collection included unique works on intersexuality, homosexuality, and transgender topics.[7][8][9][10] It's assumed that Dora Richter, the first transgender woman known to have undergone sex reassignment surgery (by doctors at the institute), may have been killed during the attack.[11][10]

On 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books in the square at the State Opera, Berlin, thereby presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship. In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit. The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser,[12] Erich Kästner."

The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.

— Joseph Goebbels, Speech to the students in Berlin[13]

In his speech – which was broadcast on the radio – Goebbels' referred to the authors whose books were being burned as "Intellectual filth" and "Jewish asphalt literati".[5]

Not all book burnings took place on 10 May as the German Student Union had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on 21 June, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.

All of the following types of literature, as described by the Nazis, were to be banned:

• The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany (H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland);
• The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism;
• Pacifist literature;
• Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic (Walther Rathenau,[12] Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann);[12]
• All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig);
• Books that advocate "art" which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (George Grosz, Otto Dix, Bauhaus, Felix Mendelssohn);
• Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk (Magnus Hirschfeld[12]);
• The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of "Asphalt and Civilization" literati: (Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Blei);
• Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field;
• Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life's goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life;
• Patriotic kitsch in literature.
• Pornography and explicit literature
• All books degrading German purity.

Many German students were complicit in the Nazi book burning campaign. They were known as Deutsche Studentenschaft, and when they ran out of books in their own libraries they turned to independent bookstores. Libraries were asked to stock their shelves with material that stood up to Hitler's standards, and destroy anything that did not.[14]

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.[3] The Nazis also seized many books from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. They did intend to keep and display a few rare and ancient books in a museum on Judaism after the Final Solution was successfully completed.[15]

Among the other German-speaking authors whose books student leaders burned were:

Vicki Baum, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, 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, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, Robert Musil, Carl von Ossietzky,[12] Erwin Piscator, Alfred Polgar, Gertrud von Puttkamer, Erich Maria Remarque,[12] Ludwig Renn, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph Roth, Nelly Sachs, Felix Salten,[16] 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 French authors such as Henri Barbusse, André Gide, Victor Hugo and Romain Rolland; American writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Margaret Sanger;[17] as well as British authors Joseph Conrad, Radclyffe Hall, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Henry de Vere Stacpoole, H. G. Wells, Irish authors James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; and Russian authors including Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, 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.

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."[19]

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.[20] 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".[21] 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.[20]

Alfred Kantorowicz, the author of the 1944 article Library of the Burned Books, was one of the key leaders instrumental in creating this library. In his article, he explains first-hand how the library came to be, and how it was finally destroyed. The library not only housed those books banned by the Nazis, the more important mission was to be the “center of intellectual anti-Nazi activities”.[20] In addition, it had extensive archives “on the history of Nazism and the anti-Nazi fight in all its forms”.[20] At the start of the war, the Nazis were virtually in control in France so the French government closed down the library and anyone associated was imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Once the Nazis occupied Paris, the library and archives were turned over and that was the end of the Library.

In Kantorowicz’s words, “the real significance of the Library was not confined to its material existence. When we inaugurated it, 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. And furthermore, by this symbolic action, we wanted to awaken Europe to the dangers which threatened its spiritual as well as its material existence.”[20]

A similar library, modeled after one in Paris, was opened at the Brooklyn Jewish Center in Brooklyn, New York on 15 November 1934. There were speeches given by Rev. Dr. Israel H. Levinthal, Rabbi of the Jewish Center, and the library chairman Rabbi Louis Hammer. An inaugural dinner dedicated to Albert Einstein and Heinz Liepmann was held on December 22, 1934.[22]

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.[22] Unlike the Paris library, the American library did not have any collection of books relating to Nazi ideology, or events or individuals in Nazi Germany.[23]

The library was a strong advocate for the cause of Zionism, the movement for a Jewish homeland. To the minds of those in charge of the library, the Nazi book burnings represented "proof of [the] urgency" of Zionist affairs.[23] Rabbi Stephen Wise, who spoke at the inaugural dinner, had led a protest at Madison Square Garden on the day of the book burning, and was an advocate of the Zionist movement. Thomas Mann, whose books were part of the library's collection, is quoted as saying that "what happened in Germany convinced me more and more of the value of Zionism for the Jew".[23]

The American Library of Nazi Banned Books remained in place until the Brooklyn Jewish Center closed in the 1970's. Its collection was then donated to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City.[23]

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. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings.[24]

Artworks were under the same censorship as other media;

all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody.

The directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the U.S. Those confiscated paintings still surviving in U.S. custody include, for example, a painting "depicting a couple of middle aged women talking in a sunlit street in a small town".[25]

• The 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features a scene which is set to the backdrop of a book burning event, an event which is part of a large Nazi rally in Berlin which is attended by Adolf Hitler. The fictional scene was set in 1938 and it took place at the Institute of Aryan Culture.
• Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings was a traveling exhibition which was produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[26] In 2014, the exhibition was displayed in West Fargo, North Dakota; Dallas, Texas; and Missoula, Montana.[27]