Bibliocaust

Undampered by a chilly drizzle, some 40,000 Germans jammed the square between Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University and the Opera House looking at a black mass of criss-crossed logs, insulated from the pavement by sand. A thumping band blared out old military marches. Toward midnight a procession entered the square, headed by officers of the University's student dueling corps in their dress uniforms: blue tunics, white breeches, plush tam o'shanters and spurred patent leather jack boots. Behind them came other students and a line of motor trucks piled high with books. More students clung to the trucks, waving flaring torches that they hurled through the air at the log pile. Blue flames of gasoline shot up, the pyre blazed. One squad of students formed a chain from the pyre to the trucks. Then came the books, passed from hand to hand while a leather-lunged student roared out the names of the authors:

"Erich Maria Remarque [wild cheering]--for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal!"

"Emil Ludwig--burned for literary rascality and high treason against Germany."

"Sigmund Freud--for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures. . . ."

On he went, calling out the names of practically every modern German author with whom the outside world is familiar: Karl Marx, Jakob Wassermann, Albert Einstein, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger. Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Walther Rathenau.

Burned, but not condemned to the crowd, were books by several U. S. authors: Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, John Dos Passes, Ex-Judge Ben Lindsey.

While the flames flared highest, up to a little flag-draped rostrum stumped clubfooted, wild-eyed little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in the Nazi Cabinet, organizer of the great midnight bibliocaust.

"Jewish intellectualism is dead!" cried he. "National Socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself!

"These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old etra, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. . . . The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts. ... As you had the right to destroy the books, you had the duty to support the government. The fire signals to the entire world that the November revolutionaries have sunk to earth and a new spirit has arisen!"

All over Germany similar pyres blazed with similar books. In the Romerberg, Frankfurt's medieval marketplace, a band played Chopin's Funeral March during the firing. In Munich only 100 books were burned, yanked from the shelves of the University library. Breslau boasted that it burned 5,000 Ib. of heretical works, Kiel burned 2,000 volumes.

Nowhere was a real effort made to destroy all copies of all books on the Nazi Index. In Berlin, in fact, a special library committee was hastily organized to comb through the masses of literature brought in by enthusiastic Nazis for irreplaceable volumes, rare editions. No Bibles were burned. Pride of the book burners was the seizure and destruction of the files of famed Sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who has analyzed many an abnormal Nazi leader in his Institute for Sex Science. Heir to Krafft-Ebing's theories, Dr. Hirschfeld put over the door of his Institute the motto of Hitler's hero Frederick the Great, "I intend in my state that every man amuse himself in his own way."

The day of the book burning in Germany, 80,000 New York Jews paraded behind Major General John F. O'Ryan. Schoolchildren shouted "TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT, WHO WOULD WE ASSASSINATE? HITLER! BOO! BOO! BOO!" At least 50,000 more Jews paraded in Chicago, 20,000 in Philadelphia. One- time Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby made a speech in New York's Battery Park:

"The Germany of today is captained by madmen. She is galloping to the brink of destruction. It is not far off. She has forfeited the respect of mankind and has invited the censures which are being heaped upon her by all people regardless of race, creed or nationality."

Meanwhile New York newshawks went down to the incoming Italian liner Rex to interview a Berlin correspondent of long experience, buxom Dorothy Thompson, wife of Nobel Prizeman Sinclair Lewis.

Dorothy Thompson had plenty to say:

"I was wrong about Hitler before this visit. I once laid a bet he wouldn't last a year. Today I wouldn't take odds on how long he will last. I still believe Hitler is a little man, but I see that he is a really great demagog. He believes all that nonsense. He is the apotheosis of the little man.

"What Germany is now experiencing is a mass movement of a new kind. This is not a return to Potsdam. It is the coming forth of the lower middle class who had no future under the imperialistic and the last German Governments. It is a revolution against culture, a culture which cost them too much.

"They are the victims of a War-defeat psychosis. That fact eats into their very hearts, because they were taught to believe that their military machine could not fail. When Hitler tells them that this machine did not fail but that it was betrayed, they believe him.

"After the War defeat came inflation, and then the crazy period of luxury living, all of which more and more excluded the lower middle classes. ... It had no place, and therefore in order to save itself, it made its goal identical with the Government itself.

". . . It is difficult to explain what has happened to the Jews because nobody will talk. Jews themselves will tell you with tears in their eyes that everything is all right. ... I went to a hospital for information. I sent in Mr. Lewis's card and finally the head physician saw me. He refused to answer any questions. However, an interne told me that he was dismissed for writing descriptions of beaten patients on the hospital charts. There were 15 serious Jewish cases in his own ward. Jews beaten until injured for life, one nearly blind, one who had to be sent to an insane asylum, one with many stab wounds in his arm, another shot through the leg many times."

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