NAZI Book Burnings: University Students

 NAZI book burning
Figure 1.--The SA thigs we understand burning books. It is more difficult to understand university students burning books and literature. Most of the photographs centered on wide-angle shots from afar, but here we can see the pasion with which university students conducted the book burning. Source: UPI.

University students like much of German society, becamne heavily politicized in the aftermath of World War I. Many university students were drawn to right-wing politics and gradually the NAZIs became the dominant right-wing group. There were in 1933 two important university student groups. The first predated the NAZIs. It was the Deutsche Studentenschaft which was founded in 1919 and to which all German university students had to belong. The second was the National Socialist Studentenbund, a NAZI Party organization. After the NAZI takeover in January 1933 competition between the two groups increased as it was increasinglu obvious that one of the two would be disbanded. There was little or no active student opposition to the book burings on the part of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, in fact many members tried to "out NAZI " the NAZI National Socialist Studentenbund. [Stratz, pp. 347-372.] One of the most disturbing aspect of the NAZI book burings was that it was not just conducted by SA thugs, but by some of Germany's brightest, most idealistic young people. One American journalist working in Germnany at the tome wrote, "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, mobilized by the little doctor [Goebbels], performed veritable Indian dances and incantatiins as the flames began to soar skyward." [Lochner, pp. 17-18.]

Sources

Louis B. Lochner, ed. The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (Doubleday: New York, 1948), 566p.

Stratz, Hans-Wolfgang. "Die Studentische `Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist' im Frühjar 1933," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Vol. 4, 1968, pp. 347-372. Note that the NAZI Einsatzgruppen used the same term, "Aktion" to describe the murder of Jews and other civilians in Poland and the Soviet Union during World War II.







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Created: 4:13 AM 9/10/2008
Last updated: 4:14 AM 9/10/2008