This is from the British press in May 1933, so early on in the Nazi party’s attack on freedoms. Breslau was then part of Germany, but is now Polish Wrocław, and the warning signs of the terror are apparent very early on. The burnings were organised by Deutsche Studentenschaft, a Nazi controlled umbrella organisation for students, and there were around 34 of them across the country on the same evening.
The book burnings were attended by an alarming number of younger people, this wasn’t just a stage managed event, with the whole process being turned into something of an evening out with procession and nationalism along the way.
The Nazi Alfred Rosenberg apparently tried to save sections of Jewish libraries. He didn’t have motives of tolerance and understanding though, he wanted to seize them so that he could use them as research material for his ideological “studies” into why the Jews needed to be destroyed.
Rosenberg was executed by the allies after the Nuremberg trials, but there’s one interesting story relating to him which also took place in May 1933. Rosenberg came to the UK and tried to show that the Nazis weren’t a threat and he laid a wreath at the cenotaph with a swastika on it. James Edmond Sears, a Labour Party candidate for South West St. Pancras, cut it up and had it chucked in the River Thames. He was fined and Sears was widely condemned in the media for his actions. History perhaps now shows that he was one of the forward thinking heroes, one of the few to call Rosenberg and the Nazi regime out so early.