Book Burning?

Otium · Postby **Otium** » 3 years 8 months ago (Thu Sep 26, 2019 2:38 pm)

Does anyone know the origin and full context of this image?

Lamprecht · Postby **Lamprecht** » 3 years 8 months ago (Thu Sep 26, 2019 4:55 pm)

HMSendeavour wrote:Does anyone know the origin and full context of this image?

book-banin.jpg

I think that is from, the National Socialist German Students' League and their 10 May 1933 "Action Against the Un-German Spirit" book burnings. Targeting of Jewish, Marxist and pro-Homosexuality books for the most part

Otium · Postby **Otium** » 3 years 8 months ago (Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:01 am)

Lamprecht wrote:
HMSendeavour wrote:Does anyone know the origin and full context of this image?

book-banin.jpg

I think that is from, the National Socialist German Students' League and their 10 May 1933 "Action Against the Un-German Spirit" book burnings. Targeting of Jewish, Marxist and pro-Homosexuality books for the most part

Sorry. I should rephrase. I meant where the image itself is from, it appears to be a photo taken from a newspaper. I'd just like to know where and in what context it was published.

Mongol · Postby **Mongol** » 1 year 4 months ago (Tue Feb 01, 2022 11:57 pm)

Otium wrote:Does anyone know the origin and full context of this image?

book-banin.jpg

On the website fo the German national archive, the photo has the date 1933-05-10, the title is "Berlin, Opernplatz.- Bücherverbrennung durch Studenten", and the ID is 102-14597. The description says: [https://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/dba/en/search/?query=%22102-14597%22]

> Die öffentliche Verbrennung undeutscher Schriften und Bücher auf dem Opernplatz Unter den Linden in Berlin, durch Studenten der Berliner Universitäten!
> Die von den Studenten eingesammelten undeutschen Schriften und Bücher, werden öffentlich auf dem Opernplatz in Berlin, ins Feuer geworfen.

Translation:

> The public burning of non-German writings and books on the opera square Unter den Linden in Berlin, by students of the Berlin universities!
> The non-German writings and books collected by the students are publicly thrown into the fire on the Opernplatz in Berlin.

Carolyn Yeager said this about the photo: [https://carolynyeager.net/nazis-did-not-burn-books-more-fake-history]

> This Bundesarchiv image is labelled simply "Opernplatz, Berlin book burnings." No further details. It is the photograph that is used to represent "Nazi book burning" even though it is only one of two of such activity that exists. The other is a different view of the same scene. And apparently, these books are from the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin.

I think Wikipedia is wrong when it says that there was one book burning on May 6th and another one on May 10th: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings]

> The first large burning came on 6 May 1933. The German Student Union made an organised attack on Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (roughly: Institute of Sex Research). Its library and archives of around 20,000 books and journals were publicly hauled out and burned in the street.
> ...
> On 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books in the square at the State Opera, Berlin, thereby presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship. In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit. The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser,[11] Erich Kästner."

One of the sources cited by Wikipedia says that the documents from Hirschfeld's institute were put on a pile on May 6th, but that they were only burned 4 days later: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150118234328/http://www.qualiafolk.com/2011/12/08/institute-of-sexology]

> One of the earliest victims of Hitler’s campaign to purify Germany was Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology. On May 6, 1933, three months after Hitler came to power, government-sanctioned rioters calling themselves the Nazi Committee against the Un-German Spirit forced their way into the Institute of Sexology while Hirschfeld was out of the country. The rioters wreaked havoc on the interior of the building, throwing all of the library’s priceless documents, photographs, and artifacts onto a pile outside the institute while singing patriotic songs. Four days later, they returned to burn the pile.

In the book "The Pink Swastika", Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams also wrote that documents from Hirschfeld's institute were only burned on May 10th:
[https://electrodes.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/the_pink_swastika_lively__abrams_1995_4th_edition.pdf]

> Even the enduring image of Nazi book-burning, familiar to us from newsreels of the 1930s, was directly related to the homosexuality of Nazi leaders. The first such incident occurred four days after Hitler’s Brownshirts broke into Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin on May 6, 1933. On May 10 the Nazis burned thousands of books and files taken in that raid. The Institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime. Treatment at the Sex Research Institute was required by the German courts for persons convicted of sex crimes.

The following quotation is from the book "The memoirs of a sexologist: Discretion and indiscretion" by Ludwig Lenz, published in English in 1954. The original German book published in 1950 was titled "Diskretes und Indiskretes; Memoiren eines Sexualarztes". But since it's a post-war book written by a Jew, it's hardly a reliable source. The quotation was reproduced in the article "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Elite Rights Committee" from 1992 by Ervin Haeberle: [https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=haeberle+swastika / https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SAvQLJbI3AmIzq6h635g3ljBTCRRzVME]

> Thus, Ludwig L. Lenz, a gynecologist who worked at the Institute and who managed to escape with his life, later speculated in his _Memoirs_ about the true motive by emphasizing the personal help Hirschfeld had given to Nazi officials:
> > ... our Institute was used by all classes of the population and members of every political party.... We thus had a great many Nazis under treatment at the Institute. There was, for instance, a lady from Potsdam who, in referring to Dr. Hirschfeld, invariably said "Dr. Kirschfeld." When I drew her attention to this mistake, she replied blushing and glancing at the swastika on her breast: "Oh, Doctor, if you don't mind I should rather say 'Dr. Kirschfeld,' it sounds more Aryan."
> > Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? "Fell" is, perhaps, an understatement for it was totally destroyed; the books from the big library, my irreplaceable documents, all the pictures and files, everything, in fact, that was not nailed down or a permanent fixture was dragged outside and burned. What explanation is there for the fact that the trades union buildings of the socialists, the communist clubs and the synagogues were only destroyed at a much later date and never so thoroughly as our pacific Institute? Whence this hatred, and, what was even more strange, this haste and thoroughness?
> > The answer to this is simple and straightforward enough - we knew too much.
> > It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions. One thing, however, is certain - not ten percent of those men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal.... Many of these personages were known to us directly through consultations; we heard about others from their comrades in the party who boasted of their exalted friends...; and of others we saw the tragic results: I refer here especially to a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratches caused through the sadism of an eminent Nuernberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen year old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official in Breslau and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea, etc. etc.... Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and our other documentary material - we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters - was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute for Sexology.

Otium · Postby **Otium** » 1 year 4 months ago (Wed Feb 02, 2022 2:16 am)

Mongol wrote:On the website fo the German national archive, the photo has the date 1933-05-10, the title is "Berlin, Opernplatz.- Bücherverbrennung durch Studenten", and the ID is 102-14597.

I didn't make myself clear enough back then. I wasn't interested in the source of the image of book burnings, but the source of the image which contained the statistics alongside the image of the book burnings, the actual image I posted.

Anyway, I don't shed a single tear for the loss of Magnus Hirschfeld's "work". He wasn't a morally scrupulous scientist. Like Dr. John Money after him he was a strange perverted man politically motivated to bring the world down around him, although Money I think was more interested in his own delusions of grandeur and sexual self-gratification.

The myth of the "Homosexual Nazi", popularised in that book 'The Pink Swastika' isn't taken seriously in research today, not even the most dishonest mainstream historians are willing to support that tripe.

To speak of the book burnings (not a new thing in Germany) was "presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship" is also a myth, although an alluring one which seems to make sense on the surface, but doesn't actually have any roots:

On the other hand, the market for literature remained in private hands after 1933. What is more, the myriad lists of banned books issued by an array of institutions demonstrated one thing above all else: there was no comprehensive or all-encompassing censorship of, or control over, writers and publishing houses. Far into the 1930s, in fact, foreign titles in translation from France, Great Britain and America. . . National Socialist literary policy actually had the effect of modernizing many areas of the book trade and its institutions. Even after the Nazis seized power, the book world remained diverse and varied, as demonstrated by the fact that some personal or economic success stories begun before 1933 continued through 1945 and beyond; this would be a plausible alternative account of the story of the German book trade after the book burnings. In fact, both versions of the history of books and people after 1933 are equally valid. There are arguments and evidence to support individual aspects of each of these accounts. The world could not simply be divided into black and white after the Nazis came to power. It remained nuanced, which is why it continues to be difficult to engage with literature from the Third Reich.

Christian Adam, Bestsellers of the Third Reich: Readers, Writers and the Politics of Literature (Berghahn Books, 2021), pp. 9-10.

Indeed the 10th of May is also the date given by Adam:

On 10 May 1933, bonfi res burned across the German Reich. Students, enthused by Nazi ideology, had gathered together literature from their university libraries and elsewhere that they thought ought to be destroyed. Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud and Erich Maria Remarque were just a few of the authors whose books were tossed onto the pyres, accompanied by full-throated chants of the ‘Twelve Th eses against the un-German spirit’. And in Berlin, the Propaganda Minister himself stood before the crowd. Although the countrywide initiative had not been directly organized by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), Goebbels took full advantage of the platform.

Ibid., p. 9.

And

The literature banned by the Nazis did not disappear straightaway, and it did not vanish without a trace. Even Kleberger’s father, who till the end – although admittedly plagued by increasing doubts – remained a supporter of Hitler, had books on his shelves that had been banned after 1933. . . And it was not just in private homes but also in lending libraries and even bookshops that the bookshelves contained banned works. . . In this respect, booksellers were most certainly a privileged group who continued to have access to a wide array of books. But it is not the intention here to suggest that reading in the Third Reich regularly involved searching for unusual or banned material. In fact, people widely read mass literature with and without political tendencies.

Ibid., pp. 45-46.

I would doubt whether the list of "banned literature" really had much meaning at all, or was any more extensive than the literature published and prohibited to one degree or another in democratic countries, particularly today.

Black Eagle · Postby **Black Eagle** » 1 year 2 months ago (Fri Mar 18, 2022 11:07 am)

Otium wrote:Does anyone know the origin and full context of this image?

book-banin.jpg

I also tried to locate the source of that article. I have the full page here, although I don't remember where I got it from. Please inform me if you have any more information on this.

Mongol · Postby **Mongol** » 1 year 2 months ago (Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:36 am)

Black Eagle wrote:I also tried to locate the source of that article. I have the full page here, although I don't remember where I got it from. Please inform me if you have any more information on this.

If you just google for text within the image in double quotes, you can see that the image is from Mike Piper's book "Ye Shall Know the Truth": https://archive.org/details/YeShallKnowTheTruthBooksNationalistsNeedsToReadBeforeTheyBanThemPiperMichaelCollins2013.

BTW I've been going through old radio shows by Mike Piper, but I think some of the most interesting episodes were when he covered the takeover of the IHR and the fall of the Liberty Lobby: https://archive.org/details/2009TheFallOfLibertyLobbyAndTheIHR.