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Helen Keller’s Letter to Nazi Germany

In 1933, she attacked book-burning German students

by
Adam Chandler
May 20, 2013

Slate’s new history blog recently posted a piece on a semi-obscure letter from Helen Keller to German university students in the wake of a decision to burn books that were deemed “un-German.” Among the books was Keller’s, whose political leanings were chronicled in How I Became a Socialist. As Rebecca Onion points out, Keller’s letter contained a prescient excoriation for Germany’s treatment of its Jewish citizens.

To the student body of Germany:

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.

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.

I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.

Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.