Nazi book burning on the Opernplatz , Berlin, 1933. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration. If you thought that book burnings were a barbaric relic of the Middle Ages, think again. In the 1930s, in Nazi Germany, Austria and, later, in occupied territories, the Nazis conducted massive burnings of books they felt contained anti-Nazi ideology – including books written by Jewish authors, one of them Sigmund Freud. Perhaps most infamous were the massive, May 1933, Berlin book burnings, when more than 45,000 “Un-German” books and journals were publicly burnt, including “works on in…
