Nazi Book Burning

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Ray Bradbury once said, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them”. Book burning is a form of censorship, but as Bradbury has explained here, not reading them is worse than burning them. This could go either way, but book burning both ways has been a big element through history. Thus, there has been many cases of book burning throughout history that are religious book burnings, Nazi book burnings, and historical book burnings.
Religious book burnings happen when someone or a group of people that are against a religion or multiple religions get together and burn books of that religion such as the Bible, Qur’an, and the Torah. One case of religious book burnings happened in the Middle East in 2012 where …show more content…

One Nazi book burning happened on the tenth of May 1933 in Germany where students and soldiers burned books that were considered “un-German”. In an article by “theguardian” it says, “"The future German man," the Reichsminister declared in a speech, "will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. You do well, in this midnight hour, to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. From this wreckage, the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise" (“The History”). This explains that after the night that the books were burned, they will rise above their foolish burnings. Nazi’s also had a purpose for these actions besides being considered “non-German”, and it was mainly because the books that they burned were written by Freud, Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jack London, and H.G. Wells. What all of these authors had in common was that they were Jewish. Not only do religious and Nazi book burnings happen, but historical books have been found to have been burned.
History is an important thing, as it can be used to learn about the past. Along with other books that are burned, history is burned too. One example of this is the Qin dynasty book burning and the burying of the scholars. During the Qin dynasty, the first emperor tried to burn every record of their existence to make it seem as if he was the beginning of time. In an article