Book Burning Quotations

The whole civilized world was shocked when on the evening of 10 May 1933 the books of authors displeasing to the Nazis, including even those of our own Helen Keller, were solemnly burned on the immense Franz Josef Platz between the University of Berlin and the State Opera on Unter den Linden. I was a witness to the scene. All afternoon Nazi raiding parties had gone into public and private libraries, throwing on to the streets such books as Dr. Goebbels in his supreme wisdom had decided were unfit for Nazi Germany.  From the streets Nazi columns of beer-hall fighters had picked up these discarded volumes and taken them to the square above referred to. Here the heap grew higher and higher, and every few minutes another howling mob arrived, adding more books to the impressive pyre. Then, as night fell, students from the university…  performed veritable Indian dances and incantations as the flames began to soar skyward. 

Louis P. Lochner, Head of the Associated Press Bureau in Berlin, May 10, 1933 

Such an exhibition of the new national spirit, silly and shameful as it seems, bespeaks a mass movement plainly touched with insanity … Around the fires, in which every publication that is “un-German” was to be destroyed, German children were to gather and to be extorted to let the fires of love of the Fatherland burn brighter in their hearts.  All this was not symbolism as it is an alarming symptom of a mental and moral upset…. Many previous generations of German would have stood aghast as such a spectacle.  They would have said it was impossible in a literate Germany where the publishing and reading of books had been cultivated and cherished, as one of the chief glories of the German Reich…. It is a strange doctrine to be preached in Berlin and Leipzig, that students must be made to read the same things, to think the same things and to mold their whole lives in one pattern.  This is one more affront to the true spirit of education and to the intellectual classes in every country outside Germany….  

“Book Burning Day, The New York Times, May 11, 1933 

Fellow students, German men and women! … The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit. . .. You are doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames at this late hour of the night. It is a strong, great and symbolic act - an act that is to bear witness before all the world to the fact that the spiritual foundation of the November Republic has disappeared. From these ashes there will arise the phoenix of a new spirit. . . . The past is lying in flames. The future will rise from the flames within our own hearts. . . . Brightened by these flames our vow shall be: The Reich and the Nation and our Führer Adolf Hitler: Heil! Heil! Heil!

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of
Propaganda, May 10, 1933 

Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
Heinrich Heine, Almansor (1821) 

I held my breath while he hurled the first volume into the flames: it was like burning something alive. Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnations of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed. You felt Goebbels’s venom behind their denunciations. Children of fourteen mouthing abuse of Heine! Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front received the greatest condemnation . . . it would never do for such an unheroic description of war to dishearten soldiers of the Third Reich.

Lilian T. Mowrer, wife of American journalist Edgar Mowrer, May 10, 1933  

To the student body of Germany:  

History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. … You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds….

Helen Keller, American author who was a socialist, pacifist, and the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college,  May 9, 1933 

The bonfires are, as the Nazis have carefully informed the world, meant to be symbolic.  No one will doubt it.  They are indeed highly symbolic.  They symbolize the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime,… For these bonfires are not the work of schoolboys or mobs but of the present German Government … The ominous symbolism of [this act and] these bonfires are that there is a government in Germany which means to teach its people that their salvation lies in violence. 

Walter Lippmann , American newspaper commentator and author,  “Book Burnings in Germany, “ New York Herald Tribune , May 12, 1933 

Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. In this war against intolerance, we need all our resources. Books are weapons in the war of ideas.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to the American Booksellers Association, May 6, 1939