Why did the Nazis burn books?
The burning of books containing “un-German ideas” by Nazi storm troopers and Nazi-affiliated college students in May 1933 was a symbolic act demonstrating that the new Nazi regime would not tolerate artistic, literary, scientific, or political ideas that differed from their own anti-Semitic, nationalist ideology, and also indicated they would use violence to silence any opposition. In the early 1800s, over a hundred years earlier, the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine had stated, “Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.
The burning of books containing “un-German ideas” by Nazi storm troopers and Nazi-affiliated college students in May 1933 was a symbolic act demonstrating that the new Nazi regime would not tolerate artistic, literary, scientific, or political ideas that differed from their own anti-Semitic, nationalist ideology, and also indicated they would use violence to silence any opposition.
