and Jack London were among the damned. Papers and books ransacked from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science were pitched on to the fire with particular fervour. Then came the climax when at midnight Goebbels mounted a rostrum and declared, ‘Jewish intellectualism is dead … the German soul can again express itself.’ As bonfires burned all over the country, Birchall finished his piece for the New York Times: ‘There is going up in smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘A lot of the old German liberalism – if any was left – was burned tonight.’29 Hitler had
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