Book Burning Ten Years Ago Today Was Germany’s “blackest Day,” Owi Director Says

Elmer Davis, Director of the Office of War Information, today issued a statement drawing attention to the tenth anniversary of what he characterized as “the blackest day in Germany’s intellectual history” – the May 10, 1933 demonstration in which a mob inflamed by Nazi orators, burned thousands of volumes of the world’s best literary and scientific works, including the Bible and the books of all Jewish authors.

Mr. Davis recalled that it was just ten years ago today, amid a drizzling downpour that failed to dampen the enthusiasm of Nazi orators, and with torches and a huge bonfire lighting up the Opera Square, that 40,000 Germans assembled to watch fanatical students burn and destroy stacks of “un-German” books that millions have read and enjoyed the world over. As the crowd cheered, a student barker shouted off the names of the “un-German” authors from a Nazi index expurgatorius: “Sigmund Freud–for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures;” Emil Ludwig–for literary rascality and high treason against Germany;” “Erich Maria Remarque–for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal.”

“All told, the Nazi bonfires that day consumed 25,000 books, including the Bible and the works of Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Marx, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Ernst Toller, and Stefan and Arnold Zweig,” Mr. Davis said. “Also burned were books by such American authors as Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Jack London and Helen Keller. Since the occupation of most of Europe, tens of thousands of other books and pamphlets have been banned, burned and destroyed.”