Essay Sample on Nazi Book Burning

With books, there comes a countless amount of benefits.  Three of the main outcomes books hold happen to be the dignity of a person, the power that comes with freedom, and the knowledge of having an education.  On May 10, 1933, the Nazis began their horrific crusade against the Jewish people, by trying to steal their dignity, power, and knowledge through the burning of books.

May 10, 1933, was not the only time the Nazis burned books and numerous amounts of Jewish belongings.  May 10, 1993, was just the beginning.  One of the most famous attacks against the Jews in the late 1930s was known as Kristallnacht.  Another name for these treacherous attacks is pogroms.  A typical pogrom included the burning of synagogues (the Jewish place of worship), the burning of Jewish-owned businesses, the burning of Jewish homes, and much more.  The difference with Kristallnacht was that the Nazis burned the Hebrew Bible as well.  

The Nazis did burn the Hebrew Bible, on November 9 and 10, 1938—not one copy, but thousands; not in one place, but in hundreds of communities across the Reich; and not only in metropolises such as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne, but also in small communities such as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1,070 inhabitants, 120 among them Jewish, where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof and the Nazis marched mockingly up and down the main street with the Torah scrolls before destroying them. (Confino 370)

A reason why this attack was so harmful and impactful, is because the Hebrew Bible is a sacred part of the Jewish religion.  By this event of burning the Hebrew Bible also known as the Torah, the Nazis tried to take away a piece of the Jewish people, but the Jews never and will never let the Nazis win.

Dignity, a word that holds a lot of power.  Every single person in the world is born with dignity, however, some people try to steal it from others.  That’s exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews.  The Nazis tried and achieved the stealing of the Jewish people’s dignity.  Another name for stealing someone’s dignity is Ethnocide.  Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Lawyer explains this concept by saying, “Ethnocide concerns policies and processes designed to destroy the separate identity of a group, with or without the physical destruction of its members.” (Prott 1)  This quote shows that the one word to describe the demolishing of an ethnic group of people, is known as Ethnocide.

The Nazis wanted to take away the power of the Jewish people.  One of their ways of doing this was by burning Jewish-written books.  They believed that this would be a step in the direction of making Jews “less than” any other typical person.  Archibald MacLeish, an American poet, said it best, when he said, 

…do we recognize the power of books as truly as the Nazi mob which dumped them on a fire–do we truly and actually, in our lives as well as in our words, ascribe as great an influence to the books we write and publish and sell and catalogue and teach, as those who fear the free men's books enough to burn them? (Fishburn 235)

In the world that modern day people live in, and that world of the 1930s, people don’t realize if something bad is happening when they are not directly affected.  In the moment, people might think that burning books is “just” something to do, however, the burning of books is the stripping of mankind.

Lying, blaming, and misleading are three simple words to describe propaganda.

One might ask themselves, why would people just simply believe such demeaning and cruel comments?  There is no right answer to that question, other than the fact that people don’t want to be “different” and people don’t want to stand out, like the Jews did and still do.  “Press censorship, restricted access to information, and propaganda were used to manipulate public opinion.” (Bertin 3)  The key word in this quote is “manipulate”.  Manipulation is the process of controlling people in a skillful manner.  The Nazis in particular used manipulation to turn individuals or “followers” against the Jewish people.

One of the most controversial topics in the world is censorship.  People argue that it’s good because they believe that certain things don’t need to be discussed, and others argue that it’s bad because it limits someone’s ability to make an opinion with the lack of all facts.  Censorship prevents people from properly learning, understanding, and questioning.  Those are three concepts that should never, under any circumstances be limited.  Although it takes a while to recognize, censorship deprives people of being their own person and leaves people ignorant. (Bertin 7)  Even though a tremendous amount of Nazis and supporters of Nazis were ignorant, that does not give them the right to spread horrific lies about a minority.  Ignorance is one of the worst qualities any individual can have.

Jews had to face countless numbers of restrictions solely on the reason they are Jewish.  Nazis restricted the Jews in inhumane ways such as persecuting them and raiding them for all nearby to see.  With time, Jews living in Berlin, eventually no longer were known as being part of Berlin’s public body.  As days progressed, Jews were supervised by the Gestapo, also known as the secret police force for Nazi Germany. (Berlin 3)  Being a minority, Jewish people had less of a say than the Nazis that ended up ultimately slaughtering over 6 million of them.  How this happened, is a famous question asked by people, but that question will forever remain unanswered.

Burning books was just the start of the disaster of persecution in the 1930s and forward.  Books will always hold knowledge, power, and dignity, but people will not.  Once a person loses those three components there is almost no way of getting them back.  Holocaust survivors and their descendants are living proof that Hitler and the Nazis did not succeed.