To highlight Banned Books Week (October 4-10, 2026) this blog post remembers Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh President Samuel Harden Church and his ceremonial protest of Nazi bookburnings.
Three months into Adolf Hitler’s reign as Chancellor of Germany, the German Student Association announced their plans for a nationwide burning of books. “Action Against the UnGerman Spirit” would purge Germany’s libraries of massive amounts of materials deemed “degenerate,” or “UnGerman,” including hundreds of books by Jewish authors.
Samuel Harden Church most likely heard plans for the book burnings when they were first announced in April of 1933. Church was already known for not being a fan of Hitler, but as Director of the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museums) the idea of book burnings must have been tantamount to sacrilege.
Having announced their intentions in April to conduct the symbolic book burnings in May, the German Student Association gave their opponents a solid month to respond. American cities including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland began to organize anti-bookburning marches and demonstrations.
For Pittsburgh, Church organized a ceremony.
Church arranged a public meeting in the Carnegie Music Hall of Pittsburgh on the evening of May 10, 1933, to address the Nazi bookburnings that had taken place across Germany roughly six hours earlier. A large crowd filled the Music Hall, spilling out onto Forbes Avenue when the Hall reached capacity. The Jewish Criterion, a Pittsburgh-based weekly Jewish news journal, devoted a page of its May 12,1933 issue to an eyewitness account of the ceremony:
The educational forces of Pittsburgh…together with members of the clergy of all denominations, and many citizens of all walks of life, have met together in the Carnegie Music Hall for the purpose of protesting and condemning the action of the Hitler Government in burning all the books that are of Jewish Authorship or Jewish Origin…
Colonel Samuel Harden Church, President of the Carnegie Institute, that stalwart among liberals, forever championing the cause of tolerance and enlightenment, is chairman of the meeting.
Clergy and educators of Pittsburgh took turns addressing the crowd, decrying the anti-intellectual, antisemitic fervor at the heart of Germany’s book burnings. When all speakers had said their piece, Church called upon Rabbi Herman Hailperin to begin the ceremony:
One hundred Jewish students dressed in caps and gowns rise on the platform as the Rabbi, in the name of the Jewish community presents to the Carnegie library copies of one hundred [of the] books burned in Germany…Rabbi Halperin declares that “…In the giving of these books we, Jews, today reconsecrate ourselves to the ideals and teachings of this literature…”
Equally impressive are the words of Mr. Ralph Munn, director of the Carnegie Library, who in accepting the books for the library says: “It is with greatest pleasure and deepest gratitude that I accept these Jewish books from our Jewish friends for the library. I assure you it is an agency of scholarship in which ideas are never censored.”
The students, each carrying a book, proceed to the front of the stage and deposit their books with Mr. Munn as the audience rise and applaud.
The May 10 book burnings in Germany destroyed more than24,000 volumes of works not only of Jewish authors but of pacificists, socialists, and anti-fascists. Works by Helen Keller, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, and many others deemed “Un-German” or “degenerate” were burned. The library and archives of the Institute of Sexology, “an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights,” were looted on May 6th and consigned to the May 10th fires.
On a day of worldwide demonstations against Nazi Germany’s bookburning, Church’s solemn, book-laden procession appears to have been the only public protest that took the form of a ceremony. No list has been found of which 100 books were donated to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh at the protest/ceremony, nor have any books within the Library’s collection been identified as having been part of that evening’s gift.
“Pittsburgh Educators Denounce Hitlerism,” I.A. Swiss, The Jewish Criterion, May 12, 1933, p4
“6 May 1933: Looting of the Institute of Sexology,” Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, https://hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/