Video: 'Burning The Books - Germany 1933 (1933)'

(Wednesday, May 10, 1933, 11:00 p.m. Central European Time (CET); during Nazi book burnings) — The Nazis staged massive public book burnings tonight in Germany, including Berlin where some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, delivered an address at 11:00 p.m. CET before students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of “un-German” books in the square at the State Opera.

“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, Erich Kästner.”

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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.”

“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 of 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.”

In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch-lit parades against the “un-German” spirit.

Video: 'Nazi Book Burning'

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.

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, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann);
• 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);
• 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.