Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page B

the campaign.
    The notorious twelve theses the students prepared for ritual declamation during the burnings were not exclusively directed against Jews and the “Jewish spirit”: Among the other targets were Marxism, pacifism, and the “overstressing of the instinctual life” (that is, “the Freudian School and its journal Imago ”). It was a rebellion of the German against the “un-German spirit.” But the main thrust of the action remained essentially anti-Jewish; in the eyes of the organizers, it was meant to extend anti-Jewish action from the economic domain (the April 1 boycott) to the entire field of German culture.
    On April 13 the theses were affixed to university buildings and billboards all over Germany. Thesis 7 read: “When the Jew writes in German, he lies. He should be compelled, from now on, to indicate on books he wishes to publish in German: ‘translated from the Hebrew.’” 75
    On the evening of May 10, rituals of exorcism took place in most of the university cities and towns of Germany. More than twenty thousand books were burned in Berlin, and from two to three thousand in every other major German city. 76 In Berlin a huge bonfire was lit in front of the Kroll Opera House, and Goebbels was one of the speakers. After the speeches, in the capital as in the other cities, slogans against the banned authors were chanted by the throng as the poisonous books (by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Sigmund Freud, Maximilian Harden, and Kurt Tucholsky, among many others) were hurled, batch after batch, into the flames. “The great searchlights on the Opera Square,” wrote the Jüdische Rundschau , “also threw their light onto the swallowing up of our existence and our fate. Not only Jews have been accused, but also men of pure German blood. The latter are being judged only for their deeds. For Jews, however, there is no need for a specific reason; the old saying holds: ‘The Jew will be burnt.’” 77
    The Nazi students did not limit their activities to disrupting the lectures of Jewish professors and burning dangerous books. They attempted to impose their will at every level when it came to the hiring of teachers or their reinstatement as war veterans. On May 6 the leader of the Nazi student association of the Superior Professional School in Hildburghausen, Thuringia, sent an anything but subservient letter to the Thuringian education minister in Weimar. The students had been told that a Jewish teacher named Bermann was to be reinstated. After casting doubt on the validity of Bermann’s claim to frontline service during World War I, the student leader went on: “Agitation among the students is very strong, as some forty percent are members of the National Socialist Student Association, and to be taught by a racially alien teacher is incompatible with their convictions. The National Socialist Student Association addresses the urgent demand to the National Socialist government of Thuringia not to reinstate the Jewish teacher.” 78 Whether Bermann was reinstated or not is not known, but even seasoned Nazis considered the student activism something of an embarrassment. “I have been informed by State Minister of the Interior, Party member Fritsch,” wrote one of the district leaders for central Germany to Manfred von Killinger, prime minister of Saxony, on August 12, “that the State Ministry is not pleased with the situation at the University of Leipzig…. Over the last three months I have fought rigorously and consistently against any radicalization of the university. According to your wishes, I have therefore forbidden the National Socialist students to boycott any professors.” 79
    Sometimes students themselves perceived that they had gone too far: They had even blacklisted H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. The Foreign Ministry was up in arms because among the authors whose works had been burned in front of the Kroll Opera House on May 10 was the then famous promoter of European union, Count