Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/what-books-did-the-nazis-burn
by Karl Radl
We are often shown the photos of the members of the NSDAP and the SA ‘burning books’ on Berlin’s Opernplatz (lit. ‘Opera Square’) on 10th May 1933 along with trite warnings that ‘those who burn books end up burning people’ – which forgets that the Allied authorities compiled a list of circa 30,000 ‘Nazi books’ to be confiscated and destroyed in 1946 and acted on it – (1) but few have asked the question: what books did the Nazis burn?
To understand that we have to go back to four days before the famous book burning on 10th May 1933 to something that happened on 6th May 1933: the student raid on the ‘Institute for Sexual Research’ in Berlin which was a homosexual and sexual deviancy advocacy organization created and run by a jewish member of the Social Democratic Party named Magnus Hirschfeld. (2)
This was part of a broader campaign by the just elected NSDAP – after winning two general elections in 1932 and being denied power by a ‘conservative’ military dictatorship for over a year – against homosexual advocacy groups and pro-homosexual publications which began almost immediately after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor on 30th January 1933 and outlawed abortion on 15th February 1933 (3) and both pornography and homosexual rights organizations on 23rd February 1933. (4)
As it happens Hirschfeld’s ‘Institute for Sexual Research’ violated all three of these laws as well as the famous Paragraph 175 of the Prussian Legal Code which had officially forbade (male) homosexuality for decades, but the so-called ‘conservative’ German authorities had turned a blind eye to it since the eighteenth century. (5)
This is because despite the focus on its well-known promotion of homosexuality; Hirschfeld’s institute was also paid by successive German and Prussian governments to promote contraception and abortion (6) (as well as wanted to promote it for its own sake) (7) as well as also having a substantial collection of tens of thousands of ‘sexual photographs’ (i.e., homosexual/degenerate pornography) and ‘phallic objects’ (i.e., historic dildos) which were exhibited to anyone who wanted to see them in Hirschfeld’s ‘Museum of Sex’ but which were particularly promoted to young men and boys. (8)
Nor was this limited to Hirschfeld’s institute given that homosexuality and deviant sexual practices were commonly openly advertised seen on the streets of Berlin in 1932 with the famous American anti-Nazi journal Edgar Mowrer testifying in disgust in 1933 that:
‘Berlin in July 1932. In the window of a book store near the most central street-corner of the city, the following books on display (titles translated):
The Witches’ Love-Kettle.
Eroticism in Photography.
Sexual Errors.
Flagellantism and Jesuit Confessions.
The Labyrinth of Eroticism.
Sadism and Masochism (fifty cents, reduced from a dollar).
The Whip in Sexuality.
Sappho and Lesbos.
The Cruel Female.
Massage Institutes (for adults only).
A Magazine, The Third Sex.
The Venal Female.
Venal Love among Civilised Peoples.
Places of Prostitution in Berlin.
Around the purely German products were the “love classics” of two continents. While I stood and wrote down the titles, a crowd of adolescents gathered and made remarks about “lustful foreigners”. To them it was all an old story. Other book stores exhibited a similar line.
Somehow the unhampered exhibit and sale of these works was a symbol of German democracy and the “freest Republic in the world”.’ (9)
And the jewish Marxist and homosexual activist Richard Plant later wrote that:
‘During the Weimar Republic, the homosexual subculture had managed an uneasy coexistence with the larger heterosexual society surrounding it. Of course, those in the spotlight – famous actors, designers, dancers, doctors, politicians, directors, and lawyers – had to live with a certain amount of abuse. But many had acquired power, money, and even connections to the Weimar government, which served as protection. The average gay man could live unnoticed and undisturbed unless he fell victim to police entrapment or blackmail. The average lesbian enjoyed a kind of legal immunity. During the Weimar years, organized lesbian costume balls were held; luxurious lesbian bars and nightclubs flourished. Their owners never feared a police raid. The reason: neither the Second German Empire nor the Weimar Repubic had ever promulgated laws forbidding or punishing sexual acts between women. Lesbian magazines enjoyed healthy circulations, some even featuring personal ads, and a few lesbian plays achieved widespread popularity.’ (10)
In essence homosexuality and sexual degeneracy were widespread and it thus should not a surprise that Hirschfeld’s institute and its similarly jewish promoters of homosexuality like the publisher Bernhard Zack (11) and the anarchistic homosexual sexologist (and friend of Hirschfeld’s) Benedict Friedlander who also helped fund the publication of pro-homosexual and pro-pederast leaflets were among the first to be targeted. (12)
Therefore, it should be no shock that the NSDAP – and especially Goebbels – referred to Hirschfeld’s institute ‘an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth’ (13) and the SA spent the summer of 1933 going around Germany smashing up gay bars and beating up those who patronised them. (14)
This is the historical context to what then happened on 10th May 1933 on the Opernplatz in Berlin and also why the institute was raided by National Socialist students – with SA, SS and police support – on the 6th and once again on 10th May 1933 which is recounted without the required historical context by Dose:
‘On May 6, 1933, the institute was plundered by a horde of National Socialist physical education students. Portions of the library were thrown on a bonfire on the Opernplatz (Opera Square) on May 10, including Hirschfeld’s bust, which had been skewered on a stick.’ (15)
And with some of the necessary historical context by Evans:
‘On the morning of 6 May 1933, a group of vans pulled up outside Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in the smart Tiergarten district of Berlin. Out of them leapt students from the Berlin School for Physical Education, members of the National Socialist German Students’ League. They drew up in military formation, then, while some of them took out their trumpets and tubas and started to play patriotic music, the other marched into the building. Their intentions were clearly unfriendly. Hirschfeld’s Institute was well known in Berlin, not only for its championing of causes such as the legalization of homosexuality and abortion, and for its popular evening classes in sexual education, but also for its comprehensive collection of books and manuscripts on sexual topics, built up by the director since before the turn of the century. By 1933 it housed between 12,000 and 20,000 books – estimates vary – and an even larger collection of photographs on sexual subjects. The Nazi students who stormed into the Institute on 6 May 1933 proceeded to pour red ink over books and manuscripts, played football with framed photographs, leaving the floor covered in shards of broken glass, and ransacked the cupboards and drawers throwing their contents onto the floor. Four days later, more vans arrived, this time with stormtroopers carrying baskets, into which they piled as many books and manuscripts as they could and took them out onto the Opera Square. Here they stacked them up in a gigantic heap and set light to them. About 10,000 books are said to have been consumed in the conflagration. As the fire burned on into the evening, the students carried a bust of the Institute’s director into the Square and threw into the flames.’ (16)
Put another way: the NSDAP student members ransacked and vandalized the institute on 6th May 1933, but then on 10th May the SA, SS and police arrived to take away the institute’s pornography (the photograph/magazine collection), degenerate books (including the works of the Marquis de Sade for example) and the ‘phallic object’ collection (i.e., the historic dildo collection exhibited in Hirschfeld’s ‘Museum of Sex’) which they then took away in vans to the Opernplatz where they proceeded to burn them that evening.
So, the common meme is right: in essence the NSDAP actually burnt Magnus Hirschfeld’s gay porn and sex toy collection not the books of history and philosophy people tried to imply they were burning on 10th May 1933.
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References
(1) For example, see: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/denazified-library
(2) Ralf Dose, 2014, ‘Magnus Hirschfeld and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement’, 1st Edition, Monthly Review Press: New York, p. 7
(3) Cf. Henry David, Jochen Fleischhacker, Charlotte Hohn, 1981, ‘Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 81-112
(4) Richard Plant, 1986, ‘The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals’, 1st Edition, Henry Holt: New York, p. 50
(5) Ibid., p. 40
(6) Robert Beachy, 2014, ‘Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity’, 1st Edition, Knopf Doubleday: New York, p. 182
(7) Richard Evans, 2004, ‘The Coming of the Third Reich’, 1st Edition, Penguin: London, p. 375
(8) Beachy, Op. Cit., pp. xii; xiv; 162-164
(9) Edgar Ansel Mowrer, 1937, ‘Germany Puts the Clock Back’, 2nd Edition, Penguin: London, p. 149
(10) Plant, Op. Cit., p. 27
(11) Friedrich Dobe, 1987, ‘John Henry Mackay als Mensch’, 1st Edition, Edition Plato: Koblenz, pp. 18-19
(12) Ibid., p. 17
(13) Plant, Op. Cit., p. 51
(14) Ibid.
(15) Dose, Op. Cit., p. 65
(16) Evans, Op. Cit., p. 375
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