So far, American universities haven’t started burning books that students wish to see canceled. The Nazis, who famously burned the books they banned, for their own perverse reasons also sought to preserve them. Diane Mizrachi and Michal Bušek explain that policy, and how it resulted in six books bearing the stamp of a Jewish library in Prague turning up at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) library:
[The Nazis’] systematic looting of libraries all through Europe . . . resulted in the destruction and dispersion of an estimated 100 million books, and their celebratory bonfires of “un-German” books are well documented. While the overwhelming emphasis was on the destruction of Jewish books, the Nazis also targeted other literature they believed antithetical to their ideology.
Early on in the regime, however, they implemented a parallel strategy of building a core collection of Jewish works for their own scholars to study. They planned to build institutes where party scholars would interpret these texts and, using Nazi ideological perspectives, provide “scientific proof” of their racial superiority and justify their campaigns to demonize Judaism and annihilate the Jewish race. Amassing Jewish books for institute libraries was the first step in this plan. Even though these institutes and museums for “extinct people” were never built, Nazi agents stormed across Europe plundering millions of books and artifacts. They sent crates of loot to various centers for sorting and selection: preservation or destruction.
Among the thousands of libraries looted by Nazis was the Jewish Religious Community Library in Prague, . . . established in 1857 to accommodate donations of private collections from Jews as they became less interested in maintaining personal Judaica collections. It was opened to the public in 1874, becoming one of the first Jewish community libraries in Europe and among the richest. Its 1939 catalog, still in existence, records nearly 30,000 books, manuscripts, and periodicals. Like Jewish libraries everywhere under the Nazis, the collection was confiscated and dispersed.
Read more on College & Research Libraries: https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26099/34021