THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS
The Nazis believed that all non-Aryan culture had a corrupting influence on the German people. So when they came to power, they imposed strict censorship and confiscated all the published materials they deemed unacceptable. By May 1933 the political police had seized more than 500 tons of books and magazines in Berlin alone. On May 10 the Nazis symbolically purified the German nation by burning the works of 24 "undesirables"—including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Thomas Mann—in Berlin and other university towns. The excerpt below from The Goebbels Diaries, edited by Louis P. Lochner, contains an eyewitness account of this act of "purification." As you read the excerpt, note the reaction of foreign journalists to the book-burning.
The whole civilized world was shocked when on the evening of May 10, 1933, the books of the authors displeasing to the Nazis, including those of our own Helen Keller, were solemnly burned on the immense Franz Joseph 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 into 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 [Goebbels], performed veritable Indian dances and incantations as the flames began to soar skyward.
When the orgy was at its height, a cavalcade of cars hove into sight. It was the Propaganda Minister [Goebbels] himself, accompanied by his bodyguard and a number of fellow torch bearers of the New Nazi Kultur. "Fellow students, German men and women!" he said 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 rise 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 Fuehrer Adolf Hitler: Heil! Heil! Heil!”
The few foreign correspondents who had taken the trouble to view this "symbolic act" were stunned. What had happened to the "Land of Thinkers and Poets?" they wondered.
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