Was Sigmund Freud specifically listed in the 1933 Nazi book burnings?
Executive summary
Multiple primary and secondary accounts agree that Sigmund Freud was explicitly named and targeted during the Nazi book burnings of 1933: student-organised “Action against the Un-German Spirit” events and associated fire oaths singled out Freud and his writings as examples of what should be consigned to the flames [1] [2] [3]. Archival research and contemporary reporting further show Freud’s works appeared on blacklists and were routinely cited among the authors whose books were destroyed in May 1933 [4] [5].
1. What the events were and who organised them
The May 10, 1933 book burnings were largely student-led actions across dozens of university towns under the banner “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” backed by Nazi officials but initiated by the German Student Union and allied groups; on that day over 20,000–25,000 volumes were publicly torched in coordinated bonfires [2] [3] [6].
2. How Freud’s name appears in contemporary accounts
Multiple reputable institutions record that Freud’s works were specifically burned: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that the “fire oaths” read as books were tossed named Sigmund Freud among other living authors whose writings were denounced and burned [1] [3], and surviving press and later histories list Freud as a targeted author during the Opernplatz bonfire and parallel burnings [2] [7].
3. Documentary evidence: blacklists and “fire oaths”
Research into Nazi-era lists and publishing records shows mass blacklisting of thousands of authors; Cambridge University Library notes a published blacklist in the trade journal Börsenblatt that consigned more than 2,500 authors to the flames and names Freud among leading German-speaking intellectuals marked for destruction [4]. Contemporary reportage and reproductions of the student “fire oaths” include language explicitly condemning Freudian ideas—phrases like “soul-shredding overvaluation of sexual activity” were invoked as they marched Freud’s writings toward the pyre [1] [8].
4. Scholarly and journalistic consensus, with caveats
Major histories and educational sites (PBS, the Anne Frank House, the USHMM, academic libraries and reputable press) consistently list Freud among the authors whose books were burned in 1933; this convergence across institutions constitutes strong corroboration [2] [7] [1] [4]. That said, the burnings were not a single exhaustive inventory produced by a central authority—local student groups, municipal variations, and subsequent anti‑Jewish measures broadened the net—so while Freud’s inclusion is well documented, the precise inventory varied by town and event [3] [6].
5. Motives and the symbolic nature of targeting Freud
Freud was targeted for a twin reason the Nazis repeatedly invoked: his Jewish identity and the ideological threat of psychoanalysis, dismissed by the perpetrators as decadent or corrosive to German morality—images and oaths at the burnings explicitly framed Freudian thought as anathema to the “nobility of the human soul” [1] [9]. The ritualised burning of his texts served both as a public denunciation of ideas and as symbolic cultural cleansing, a message amplified in Nazi propaganda and contemporary press coverage [2] [3].
6. Alternative perspectives and possible agendas in sources
While institutional histories and museums aim for factual documentation, some secondary accounts emphasize the burnings’ theatricality and their role as propaganda, which can blur distinctions between who was named in slogans and which specific titles were physically incinerated at each site; modern summaries that list Freud alongside Einstein, Mann and others reflect both documented naming in oaths/blacklists and later memorial cataloguing efforts, such as exile-era libraries that sought to reassemble burned collections [5] [3] [4]. Sources with commemorative purposes may stress the symbolic victim list to underline cultural loss, while scholarly resources document the procedural variations across towns.
7. Bottom line and limits of available reporting
The weight of contemporary evidence and later archival work is clear: Sigmund Freud was specifically named and his writings were included among those denounced and burned during the 1933 Nazi book burnings—appearing in fire oaths, blacklists, and multiple institutional histories [1] [2] [4]. This account is supported across major museums, academic libraries, and reputable media; however, exhaustive municipal inventories of exactly which Freud titles were burned at which bonfires are not comprehensively reproduced in the cited sources, so granular day-by-day burn lists lie beyond the reporting reviewed here [3] [4].