The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1)

by Richard J. Evans

Before this happened, however, the students dealt their most dramatic and most notorious blow to intellectual freedom and academic autonomy, an act that reverberated around the world and is still remembered whenever people think of Nazism today. On 10 May 1933, German students organized an ‘act against the un-German spirit’ in nineteen university towns across the land. They compiled a list of ‘un-German’ books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares and set them alight. In Berlin the book-burning event was joined at the students’ request by Joseph Goebbels. He told them that they were ‘doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames’ in what he called a ‘strong, great and symbolic act’.88 One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect, to the accompaniment of slogans such as: ‘Against class struggle and materialism, for the national community and an idealistic outlook: Marx, Kautsky; Against decadence and moral decay, for discipline and morality in family and state: Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner.’ The works of Freud were consigned to the flames for their ‘debasing exaggeration of man’s animal nature’, the books of the popular historian and biographer Emil Ludwig were burned for their ‘denigration’ of the ‘great figures’ of German history; the writings of the radical pacifist journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky were destroyed for their ‘arrogance a...