Museum marks 10th anniversary

WASHINGTON -- The Holocaust Museum is marking its 10th year with a display on book burning that includes images from a New Mexico town where Harry Potter books were torched by people who said they teach children to become witches.\nThe museum put a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" into an exhibit, opening Wednesday, that marks the 70th anniversary of book burnings in Nazi Germany. Near it are three color photos of a bonfire set Dec. 30, 2001, by the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, N.M.\nThe Rev. Jack Brock, pastor of the New Mexico church, called Harry Potter books "a masterpiece of satanic deception" when he lit the fire. Across the street from the bonfire, hundreds of protesters, one dressed as Adolf Hitler, formed a line that stretched a quarter-mile. "Stop burning books!" they chanted.\nBook burning has become an American byword for censorship, according to the exhibit called "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burning."\nOn May 10, 1933, the official German University Students' Organization (Studentenschaft) organized bonfires of books its leaders said typified "the Un-German spirit," as defined by the Hitler's new Nazi government. A committee headed by a Nazi official compiled the first blacklist, condemning works by Jews, Marxists, socialists, liberals and others.\n"We demand of German students the will and ability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the liberal symptoms of decline associated with it in German intellectual life," the organization said in a message circulated to universities around Germany before the first fires were lit.\nThere were no protesters at the Nazi bonfires. A centerpiece of the Washington exhibit is a film of Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the star speaker at the first bonfire. The torched books included many by Americans and a famous German anti-war novel that was a best seller in the United States: Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front."\n"Unlearn your fear of death," shouted Goebbels to the students. "You must learn to respect death!"\nGuy Stern, co-curator of the Holocaust Museum exhibit, was a Jewish teenager in Germany when the book burnings began. He left Germany in 1937 and served with American forces in World War II. Now he is a distinguished professor of German and Slavic studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.\n"Hitler himself didn't take part in the book burning," said Stern, now 81. "In the early years of the regime, he liked to pretend that he was above the political fray."\nBack in 1933, protests in the United States against the Nazi book burning were immediate and widespread, often linked to the First Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press in the United States.\nOne American book burned in Germany was by Helen Keller, who conquered deafness and blindness to become a writer. She wrote an open letter to German students:\n"History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them."\nUnder the big screen at the exhibit are copies of some of the burned books: novels by Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser among authors of many nationalities. Smaller screens show President Roosevelt denouncing the book burnings and a copy of a critical newspaper column by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.