Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet and playwright, in his 1821 play, Almansor, offered a chilling forewarning, “It was just a prelude…Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.” Hundred years later, on 10 May 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, orchestrated the notorious first book burning event near the German Opera House. The conflagration that punctuated the Berlin skyline devoured more than 25,000 books that night.
At the peak of the Nazi regime, European skies were emblazoned not by the burning of books and ideas alone, but also by the stench of human flesh burning in incinerators. The macabre events that unfolded in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, reminiscent of horrors from the pit fires of hell, serve as grim reminders of the extraordinary evil that ordinary humans are capable of inflicting on fellow humans under the guise of “nationalism,” “ultranationalism”, and “fascism.”
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