Thread 17759401

Was censorship under the Nazi regime comparable to the Soviet Union, or was it extremely exaggerated?

>>17759401 (OP)
It was completely decentralized and events like the Berlin book burnings never happened outside of it. They mostly just created a general blacklist of authors that some libraries followed and removed them from circulation but it wasn't enforced

>>17759412
To add into this. Book burnings was a pr stunt to try and get Germans to go to their own libraries and burn books as a sort of "cleansing". Most Germans were just like "yeah love the symbolism, I'm just going to go home and not burn books though."

Almost all book burnings were done by independent student organizations. This is why nobody can actually name what books were permitted by the government to burn, because largely they weren't permitted. While it wasn't permitted, libraries and local authorities often allowed it to happen. This is when the tranny institute was raided and its books burned.

The general guidelines of the raids were committed along the suggestions of the "blacklist" created by a Librarian called Wolfgang Hermann, one of his motivations for creating the list was in order to advance his position in Nazi popularity by demonstrating his loyalty and to overtake rival librarian organizations.

"Lending Libraries" were said to have switched to stocking "smutt and filth" for unemployed socialists during the Weimar era and originally the goal was to remove erotica from public circulation. The rapid progression of this movement lead the librarians to instead suggest a complete reorganization of german public libraries by removing all books pertaining to "cultural Bolshevism". This movement gained the blessing of the Mayor of Berlin, Heinrich Sahm, some suggest he was "a tool of Goering". Talk about the librarian's backlist becoming official Nazi party policy was quickly shot down however.

Wolfgang would produce his own list of 131 authors with selective books of theirs to blacklist. Most notable of which were communist Weimar era playwrights and foremost soviet revolutionary authors. There was also a list of 190 non-fiction authors including Hellen Keller's book about becoming a communist, Karl Marx, Lenin and Weimar era politicians that cozied up to the Soviets.

Some of this literature would be symbolically publicly burned, but wasn't explicitly state sanctioned. Later the libraries were asked to remove the books from their inventories themselves (some of which wouldn't comply).

>>17759448
In Berlin a new professor Alfred Bäumler who was friends with Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg gave a lecture to the students telling them they should proactively take the book bans into their own hands. That night some 20,000 books were burned in a huge pyre while bands played german folk songs. The books burned included Marx, Kautsky, (communists) Heinrich Mann, (for criticizing German society) Ernst Glaeser, (for generally being a degenerate leftist) Erich Kästner, (for publishing erotica) Emil Ludwig, (falsification of German history) Sigmund Freud (destructive exaggeration of desires), Theodor Wolff, Georg Bernhard, (un-German journalism of a Jewish-democratic type) Erich Maria Remarque, (literal betrayal of the soldiers of the world war) Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky, (impudence and presumptuousness that offended the eternal German mind).

Goebbels would be asked by the students to give a speech at this book burning, which he did, and that concluded his involvement with the book burnings. Students in other cities followed the lead and also staged symbolic book burnings, often congratulated by faculty members, but never to the same degree. The next largest book burning was one of 1,000 books at the Technical University. A week later student organizations announced they would task students with visiting local libraries to see if they could find unwanted books still on the shelves and organize more book burnings, the scale of which were not reported (so probably insignificant). A total of 93 book burnings took place, a majority of which were independent without Nazi directive and the scale of which aren't known, but it's safe to assume they weren't larger than 1,000 and were likely a few dozen at a time.

Wolfgang Hermann, the librarian who started the book banning craze would later be tossed under the bus after it was discovered he directly criticized Hitler's Mein Kampf and called Hitler stupid in 1932.

>>17759401 (OP)
Neither. Nazis never had a reputation for state censorship akin to levels that the Soviets had. They had some basic wartime censorship and propaganda similar to the Allies, but that’s it.

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1749590871869502.webm

The meme goes they were burning high art and philosophy to keep the population ignorant, but they were only burning useless bullshit like Karl Marx, and it wasn't illegal to own these books or really enforced, they just weren't gong to house them in libraries or educational establishments.

>>17759460
It was mostly a show of force in berlin which was full of actual communists

>>17759401 (OP)
Nazi Germany was ironically closer to the utopian ideal of communism than the Soviet Union in the sense all institutions were absorbed into the Party which became the state. Because of this there wasn't a clear line between "state censorship" and what any local institution was censoring

>>17759460
> they just weren't gong to house them in libraries or educational establishments.

Were these libraries state-funded or were they privately ran?

>>17759494
Both. But they had no way to regulate private branches and didn't.