Beatriz C. - Book burning

Anti-fascist organizations, American Jewish groups, and numerous writers, scholars, and journalists recognized the ominous intent of the Nazi “culture war” that made blood and race the source of inspiration. The American Jewish Congress hoped to broaden the coalition of anti-Nazi Americans by using the May 10 book burnings as a unifying cause. It urged mass street demonstrations to take place that same day. As the German literary blacklists circulated in the press, American authors published declarations of solidarity with their condemned brethren. Throughout the 1930s, as the flood of German émigré writers rose, American literary organizations provided aid where they could in response to the crisis.

On May 10, 1933, the same day as the book burnings in Germany, massive street demonstrations took place in dozens of American cities. Skillfully organized by the American Jewish Congress, the demonstrators protested the relentless Nazi attacks upon Jews: the continued harassment, police raids, arrests, and beatings, as well as the destruction of Jewish property and the boycott of Jewish businesses. In the largest demonstration in New York City history up to that date, 100,000 people marched for more than six hours to protest events in Germany and the burning of books. Other mass demonstrations by a variety of American groups took place in cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago.

American newspapers nationwide reported both the Nazi bonfires and the American protests. Editorial opinion was nearly unanimous in its condemnation but uneven in its rhetoric. Some newspapers called the German student actions “silly,” “ineffective,” “senseless,” or “infantile.” The New Yorker made light of the “extra-curricular activities” of Nazi students.” Essayist E. B. White joked, “We never burn books except to keep them out of the hands of the grand jury.” But others, such as Ludwig Lewisohn of The Nation, forecast the dawning of a “dark age,” an “insane” assault “against the life of the mind, intellectual values, and the rights of the human spirit.”

Blind and deaf since infancy, by 1933 Helen Keller was a revered symbol of victory over incredible adversity. Dispatches from Berlin about the burning of books—her own among them—left Keller “deeply hurt over the whole matter,” according to her companion, Polly Thompson. Moved to write an open letter to German students, Keller affirmed the enduring power of ideas against tyranny. The letter appeared on the front page of the New York Times and in hundreds of other American newspapers. Stung by the publicity surrounding Helen Keller’s letter, the Nazi propaganda ministry questioned whether her books had been blacklisted, then dismissed the bonfires as unofficial, “spontaneous acts by the German Students Association.” In 1937, she ordered all her books dropped from German sales lists, expressing dismay over “Germany’s antisemitic atrocities, fear-clamping state control over lives and home, [and] imprisonment of thousands without trial.” Hitler’s suppression of “fundamental liberties without which a nation’s soul is dead” had made Germany a place of “chattel slavery, idolatry, and infringement upon Christian consciences.”

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/bookburning/response.php