The Nazi Censorship of Jewish Literature

An Antisemitic drawing of a Nazi soldier halting a Jewish capitalist being hauled by dying Germans.

Organized groups of university students in Germany burned over 25,000 books on May 10, 1933. This mass desecration of literary works continued until October of the same year. The purpose was to rid the country of “un-German” ideas, perspectives, and values.  

Germany suffered a crippling economic blow after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles obligated Germany to pay approximately $33 billion in reparations, primarily to France, Russia, and Britain. This, combined with the widespread effects of the Great Depression, hyper-inflated Germany’s currency and left its citizens financially unstable, unemployed, and in dire need of someone to blame. The Nazi Party was formed in 1920 with the goal of overthrowing the German democratic system, which its members considered weak and inefficient. Adolf Hitler, who became the leader of the Nazi Party one year later, staged a coup to take over the government in the German state of Bavaria. The coup proved unsuccessful, and Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison.  

While Hitler was in prison, the other members of the Nazi Party rallied German support by spreading antisemitic propaganda, primarily the theory that Jews were manipulating financial markets to cause hyper-inflation and weaken Germany’s economy. However, the Nazi Party’s propaganda soon changed. Instead of focusing on the perceived economic slights committed by Jews, the party increasingly promoted the idea that Jews were racially inferior and needed to be expelled from Germany.

After Hitler was elected Chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933, he quickly set to work systematically destroying Germany’s democracy through coercion and the suppression of his political opponents. This dismantling of democratic society extended into culture and education. Universities, long considered pillars of free thought, were transformed into indoctrination factories that churned out students loyal to the Nazi Party. It was in this atmosphere that student government bodies organized the exclusion of Jewish works from universities. In April 1933, the German Student Union (Deutsche Studentenschaft or DSt) published “The Twelve Theses,” urging citizens to protect German language and culture by removing Jewish works from libraries and requiring Jewish authors to publish their works in Hebrew, claiming that a Jewish author writing in German was an abuse of the language. Purifying German literature by removing Jewish authors from libraries wasn’t enough, though; the students sought to dramatically externalize their animosity toward Jews and political opponents like leftists and pacifists.

A photo of members of the Hitler Youth, the youth wing of the Nazi Party, burning “un-German” books.

On May 9, 1933, guidelines for book burnings were issued, including “fire oaths,” which were to be recited during rituals. These fire oaths, verbalized while tossing books onto the bonfires, explained why they were being burned. The following day consisted of over 40,000 students, citizens, and national government officials gathering across 34 towns to set over 25,000 books ablaze. The flame-riddled works included those of prominent Jewish authors such as Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Erich Mühsam, who was murdered at the Orianenburg concentration camp one year later. At the Berlin book burning, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda under Adolf Hitler, proclaimed, “The age of excessive Jewish intellectualism is now over, and the breakthrough of the German revolution has also cleared the path for the German way.” His words and the public spectacle he endorsed revealed how the Nazi regime manipulated German citizens into ideological conformity to control them politically.

Even though the federal government didn’t organize the months-long book burnings, it later legitimized the actions of the students by creating agencies and enacting policies and laws against Jewish authors, further marginalizing and dehumanizing them. Joseph Goebbels established the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture or RKK) in September 1933. All German creative professionals had to register with it to publish or perform their work. To register, citizens were required to obtain a certificate of Aryan (white, non-Jewish) descent. If a person wanted to engage in creative pursuits, they had to be registered under one of the seven subcultures of the RKK: literature, theater, film, music, radio, fine arts, and press. This made it easier for Nazi officials to filter out Jews and leftists, who would most likely reject Nazi ideology and instead pursue their own cultural or political expressions through their work.

In addition, Jewish authors and intellectuals had their works seized by Nazi officials through a process known as Aryanization, which often included the omission of Jewish culture from reproduced work. For example, Alice Urbach, a Jewish Viennese woman, was forced to concede the rights to her work So kocht man in Wien!, which was then republished under the name Rudolph Rösch. Even though much of the work kept Urbach’s original photos and text, any mention of Jewish identity was essentially scrubbed from the cookbook, including recipes that were “too Jewish”. From 1933 to 1945, Germans directly profited from redistributing the works of Jewish authors while publicly denouncing those same writers as “un-German.” This hypocrisy meant that Jewish creativity was exploited behind the scenes, even as Jewish voices were erased, censored, and vilified in public discourse. In doing so, the regime not only enriched itself but also reinforced its propaganda that Jewish culture had no place in German life.

A photo of Jewish people being deported from Bielefield, Germany, to the Riga Ghetto.

On November 12, 1938, the German government issued the “Decree on the Elimination of the Jews From Economic Laws.” This law explicitly barred Jewish individuals from owning any type of profitable business. The Steiner family had ran an antiquarian bookstore for nearly a century before becoming victims of the decree. Their store was Aryanized by popular writer Ludo Ondrejov, though he allowed members of the family to work for him until he reported them as “useless” to Nazi authority. Sixteen members of the Steiner family would later be murdered in concentration camps, and several more were deported. The hundreds of decrees passed in the 1930s weren’t just about regulating the economic and social lives of Jewish people; they were laying the foundation for their total extermination. The economic isolation of Jews in Germany stripped them of their humanity and stability, and it made their lives significantly harder. Many, if not most, families were forced to abandon their homes and sell their possessions, ending up homeless or dependent on Jewish aid organizations. This isolation weakened the Jewish community to the point where once deportations began, there was little left to shield them from persecution.

It is important to remember the circumstances to which Jews were subjected, including authors. The persecution and removal of Jewish authors and publishers left a hole in the fabric of Germany’s intellectual, creative, and cultural history, never to be fully restored. All it took was students organizing book burnings, targeting works they deemed “un-German,” to set in motion a chain of censorship, exclusion, and exploitation. From these early acts of ideological policing, the Nazi regime expanded control through laws, Aryanization, and propaganda, systematically removing Jewish authors and publishers from Germany’s cultural life. In the face of book bans today, we should ask ourselves: Are certain types of books or authors being banned disproportionately? And, if yes, what will that mean for our society?