04/27/2026
It always starts with books.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building -- seat of the German parliament -- was set ablaze. Within hours, Hi**er convinced President Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending fundamental civil liberties including freedom of speech, press, and assembly. This single emergency decree gave the N**i regime sweeping powers to shut down newspapers, silence opposition voices, and arrest political opponents without trial. It marked the beginning of a systematic dismantling of democratic rights that would define the totalitarian state. The suppression of free expression would soon take a more symbolic but equally chilling form.
Within three months, the regime had moved from silencing living voices to destroying written ones: on May 10, 1933, N**i Party students burned 20,000 books on Berlin's Bebelplatz, a site now marked by 'The Empty Library' memorial. This subterranean installation, created by artist Micha Ullman in 1995, consists of empty white bookshelves visible through a glass plate set into the cobblestones, designed to hold approximately the same number of books as were burned at this site. When visitors look down through the glass panel, they see "what is missing": underground, almost out of sight, no books, empty white shelves, directly under the Bebelplatz. Nearby, a bronze plaque bears Heinrich Heine's prophetic 1820 quote: "Where you burn books, you end up burning men" -- words that gained terrible significance during the Holocaust.
The book burning that inspired this memorial was a pivotal event in the evolution of N**i censorship and repression. On May 10, 1933, approximately 40,000 people gathered in what was then called Opernplatz as 5,000 far-right students affiliated with the N**i Party marched with burning torches to ignite piles of books which had been seized from the Humboldt University library, public libraries and private collections throughout Berlin, and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science).
A month earlier, the N**i German Student Association had announced a nationwide initiative "against the un-German spirit" and directed local chapters to collect books from a list of 4,000 titles that the N**i Party had deemed "objectionable" for a "säuberung" or cleansing by fire. Among the books burned that night included works by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and many others.
This was not an isolated incident -- N**i student groups carried out similar public burnings in 34 university towns across Germany over the next several weeks, in particular targeting democratic, leftist, and Jewish literature. When they ran out of "objectionable material" from their university libraries to burn, they would raid public libraries and bookstores. In response, Helen Keller, whose books were blacklisted, wrote to German students: "You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on."
As author Margaret Atwood later observed: "Censorship is always about who's allowed to speak, and who isn't. And that's always political. A word after a word after a word is power."
If we don't stand up to such censorship and assaults on freedom of speech today, we risk walking the same path that led to some of history's darkest moments.
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For powerful books for tweens and teens about girls living in real-life oppressive societies with little respect for freedom of expression, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
For an inspiring book about a Mighty Girl fighting against censorship in school, we highly recommend "Ban This Book" for ages 9 to 12 at https://www.amightygirl.com/ban-this-book
For two excellent books about Mighty Girls who find hope by reading forbidden books - both for ages 12 and up - we recommend "Voices" (https://www.amightygirl.com/voices) and "The Book Thief" (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-book-thief)
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
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