The first strand was the wholesale destruction of the entire written record of groups singled out for obliteration: this assault on culture, to wipe memory from the face of the earth, has been described as libricide, the genocide of books. Second, in paradoxical opposition to this policy, was the systematic collecting in Nazi Germany of huge collections of the books of enemy ideologies, so that even in the perennial rule of National Socialism, these evils – Bolshevism, Socialism, Judaism, Freemasonry – could be studied.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 754