| Original caption: “Members of the Hitler Youth participate in burning books. The burning of books that are condemned as Jewish-Marxist is a vast anti-Semitic activity of Nazi Germany.” Around 1,200 books by denounced authors were piled up and burned on the Residenzplatz in Salzburg. Staged by the Hitler Youth, the event was intended to capture the public’s attention and send a clear message, even announced and commentated on in the local press. Salzburg residents conducted a bücherverbrennung (“book burning”) in the Residenzplatz in 1938. This was 1 in a series of vicious antisemitic acts. After the Anschluss, Nazi sympathizers also burned the city’s synagogue, placed Jewish citizens in Salzburg under Nuremberg laws, and beat Jewish men on the street. Southern Germany is just over the border from the city, and Hitler found a lot of strong support from Austrians. In his memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (“The World of Yesterday”) written in 1942, Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) tells stories of terrified Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Bavaria in the early 1930s. As a Jew, Zweig quickly saw the writing on the wall. On his last visit to Salzburg, in 1936, he conducted his own burning; thousands of volumes of his books were carted away, some to the Austrian National Library, others to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while his collection of autograph catalogs “and God knows what else” vanished, never to be seen again. Friderike Maria Zweig (December 4, 1882 – January 18, 1971), Zweig’s 1st wife, wrote in her memoir, “For two days [our] incinerator smoked from an auto-da-fé of letters and innumerable papers. Stefan stood there watching the flames which seemed to liberate something inside him.” After the great fire was finished, Zweig walked off alone from the house. An old friend who ran into him on his way down the mountain found the look on Zweig’s face so intense that it frightened him. After fleeing Austria and living for a time in a series of Allied countries, Zweig moved to Brazil. He and his 2nd wife, Charlotte E. “Lotte” Altmann (May 5, 1908 – February 23, 1942), depressed about the rise of fascism worldwide, committed suicide in Petrópolis, Brazil. | |
| Image Filename | wwii1727.jpg |
| Image Size | 595.32 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2732 x 1985 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 30, 1938 |
| Location | |
| City | Salzburg |
| State or Province | Salzburg |
| Country | Austria |
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| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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