Library: An Unquiet History by Matthem Battles (17)

Even at the height of Nazi censorship in the late thirties and beyond, the Reich’s lists of banned books were kept secret. Booksellers, teachers, and private citizens were left to glean the criteria for exclusion from Goebbels’s gnomic pronouncements on the maintenance of the people’s spirit. And so it was not only mobs that burned books. Fearing house searches, ordinary Germans burned their own books before the storm troopers could find them.

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