III

It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities. They organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers, staged mass disruptions of their lectures and led detachments of stormtroopers in house-searches and raids. Another tactic was to underline the political unreliability of some professors by arranging visiting lectures by politically correct figures such as Heidegger, who could be relied upon to give the regime the enthusiastic endorsement that others sometimes failed to provide. At Heidelberg University, one Nazi activist disrupted the work of the physicist Walter Bothe by conducting lengthy marching sessions for SS men on the roof of his institute, directly above his office.⁸⁴ In one university after another, respected Rectors and senior administrators were elbowed aside to make way for often mediocre figures whose only claim to their new position was that they were Nazis and enjoyed the support of the Nazi students’ organization. A typical figure was Ernst Krieck, a convinced Nazi theorist of male supremacy who became Rector of Frankfurt in 1933; until his sudden elevation he had been a lowly professor of pedagogy in the city’s teacher training college.⁸⁵ At Darmstadt Technical University, the adjunct lecturer Karl Lieser, who joined the Party early in 1933, aroused the wrath of his colleagues in the Architecture Department by denouncing many of his colleagues to the Hessian Ministry of Education in May; outraged, the University Senate deprived Lieser of his right to teach, asked the Ministry to dismiss him, and temporarily closed the University in protest. The next day, however, the students reopened and occupied the buildings, while the Ministry named the Mayor of Darmstadt provisional Rector. The professors caved in under this pressure. Lieser was reinstated, and became a professor himself in 1934. By 1938 he had become Rector. These events, which had their parallels in all of Germany’s universities, marked a sharp fall in the traditional power of the professoriate. ‘We lads have got the university in our hands,’ declared the Nazi student leader in Leipzig, Eduard Klemt, ‘and we can do with it what we will.’⁸⁶

The students’ unions did not rest content with pushing forward the Nazification of the professoriate. They also demanded a formal role in professorial appointments and representation on disciplinary committees. However, this proved a step too far. Participation by the student body in these matters crassly contradicted the leadership principle. By the summer of 1933, Nazified education ministries and university authorities were beginning to clamp down on student disorder, banning students from removing and destroying objectionable books from libraries, and scotching a plan by the national students’ union to set up a pillory in each university town, where the publications of ‘un-German’ professors would be nailed up. No student was actually disciplined for disorderly conduct of a political nature in the first six months of 1933, despite the massive disruption and violence that virtually crippled university life during this period. But the message was now clear: as the Prussian Ministry of Education declared, it was the duty of the student unions ‘to keep every one of its members orderly and disciplined’.⁸⁷ Before this happened, however, the students dealt their most dramatic and most notorious blow to intellectual freedom and academic autonomy, an act that reverberated around the world and is still remembered whenever people think of Nazism today.

On 10 May 1933, German students organized an ‘act against the un-German spirit’ in nineteen university towns across the land. They compiled a list of ‘un-German’ books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares and set them alight. In Berlin the book-burning event was joined at the students’ request by Joseph Goebbels. He told them that they were ‘doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames’ in what he called a ‘strong, great and symbolic act’.⁸⁸ One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect, to the accompaniment of slogans such as: ‘Against class struggle and materialism, for the national community and an idealistic outlook: Marx, Kautsky; Against decadence and moral decay, for discipline and morality in family and state: Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner.’ The works of Freud were consigned to the flames for their ‘debasing exaggeration of man’s animal nature’, the books of the popular historian and biographer Emil Ludwig were burned for their ‘denigration’ of the ‘great figures’ of German history; the writings of the radical pacifist journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky were destroyed for their ‘arrogance and presumption’. A particular category in itself was reserved for Erich Maria Remarque, whose critical novel All Quiet on the Western Front was thrown onto the fire ‘against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War, for the education of the nation in the spirit of military preparedness.’ Many other books besides those read out in these incantatory slogans were thrown onto the pyres. The national student organization issued ‘twelve theses against the un-German spirit’ to accompany the action, demanding the introduction of censorship and the purging of libraries and declaring: ‘Our opponent is the Jew and anyone who submits to him.’⁸⁹

Map 18. German Universities in 1933

On 12 March, in a prelude to this action, stormtroopers had already ransacked the library of the trade union centre in Heidelberg, removed books and burned them in a small bonfire outside the door. A similar event had taken place, as we have seen, outside Magnus Hirschfeld’s sex research institute in Berlin on 6 May. But the 10 May book-burning was on a much larger scale, and much more thoroughly prepared. Students had been combing libraries and bookshops in readiness for the occasion since the middle of April. Some booksellers courageously refused to hang up posters advertising the event in their shop windows, but many others gave in to the threats with which the students accompanied their action. In Heidelberg, where the book-burning took place on 17 May, the students processed with flaming torches, accompanied by SA, SS and Steel Helmets and members of the duelling corps, and threw Communist and Social Democratic insignia into the flames as well as books. The event was accompanied by the singing of the Horst Wessel Song and the national anthem. Speeches were delivered in which the action was presented as a blow against the ‘un-German spirit’ represented by writers such as Emil Julius Gumbel, the statistician of right-wing murders in the Weimar years, hounded out of his chair at the university in the summer of 1932. The Weimar Republic had incorporated this ’Jewish-subversive’ spirit; it was now finally consigned to history.⁹⁰

All this marked the culmination of a widespread action ‘against the un-German spirit’ set in motion weeks before by the Propaganda Ministry. ⁹¹ As so often in the history of the Third Reich, the apparently spontaneous action was in fact centrally co-ordinated, though not by Goebbels, but by the national students’ union. The Nazi official in charge of purging Berlin’s public libraries helpfully provided a list of the books to be burned, and the central office of the national student union wrote and distributed the slogans to be used in the ceremony. In this way, the Nazi students’ organization ensured that the book-burning took a roughly similar course in all the university towns where it was carried out.⁹² And where the students led, others followed, in localities across the land. At a celebration of the summer solstice of 1933 in the small town of Neu-Isenburg, for instance, a large crowd watched ‘Marxist’ literature being burned in a huge pile in an open space behind the fire station. As the local women’s gymnastics’ club danced around the fire, the local Party leader gave a speech, followed by a rendition of the Horst Wessel Song by the assembled multitude. Book-burning was by no means a practice confined to the highly educated.⁹³

The Nazi book-burning was a conscious echo of an earlier ritual, performed by radical nationalist students at the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s launching of the Reformation with the publication of his theses attacking the Catholic Church, at the Wartburg in Thuringia on 18 October 1817. At the close of the day’s festivities, the students had thrown symbols of authority and ‘un-German’ books such as the Code Napoléon onto a bonfire in a form of symbolic execution. This action may have provided a precedent in Germany’s canon of nationalist demonstrations, but in fact it had little in common with its later imitation in 1933, since a principal concern of the Wartburg Festival was to express solidarity with Poland and to demonstrate in favour of the freedom of the German press, constricted by massive censorship from the police regime inspired by Prince Metternich. Still, as the flames rose to the skies in Germany’s ancient seats of learning on 10 May 1933, encouraged or tolerated by the newly Nazified university authorities, there must have been more than a few who recalled the poet Heinrich Heine’s comment on that earlier event, over a century before: ‘Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.’⁹⁴