Where Books are Burned…

What Started with Nazi Book Burning in 1933 was Foretold Long Before by a Writer — Heinrich Heine

Is there room in this world for prophecy in the face of evil? Well, consider this:

On May 10, 1933, no less than 34 organized book burnings took place in cities and towns throughout Nazi Germany.

From Heidelberg to Munich to Berlin, members of the German Student Union zealously took it upon themselves to stage the public burning of what they considered ‘decadent’ literature.

Following torchlight parades through the streets, students in numerous cities broke into public libraries hunting for the works of prominent Jewish and progressive writers such as Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, and H.G. Wells.

At least 25,000 books deemed “un-German” in spirit were tossed into pyres that night in front of cheering civilians, Nazi stormtroopers, and a live radio audience — all part of the Nazis’ relentless effort to forge a new, purer Germany.

In Berlin Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels stepped up to the microphone and exhorted the crowd “to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past.”1

Among the writers whose works were burned that night was the German poet and playwright Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). A century earlier Heine wrote this line of dialogue in his play Almansor:

“Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.”

And so it was that two months before these books were burned, construction had already begun on the crematoria at the first Nazi concentration camp. Outside a small Bavarian village named Dachau.

1 Metaxas, Eric. (2010) Bonhoeffer — Pastor, Martyr, Prohet, Spy, Thomas Nelson pub., page 163.