Wolfgang Herrmann (librarian)

In April 1933, after the Nazis seized power, a committee met in Berlin to establish a "new order" for Berlin public libraries. Herrmann was a member of the committee. For several years, he had already been preparing lists of literature to weed out, which he brought to the new committee. Herrmann's first lists served to indicate works that libraries should refrain from lending. However, he also had lists of books to recommend, such as Hitler – ein deutsches Verhängnis by Ernst Niekisch and Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm der Dritte by Weigand von Miltenberg (pen name of Herbert Blank), but set little store with Hitler's Mein Kampf. As a result, shortly after the book burnings, the Nazi Party press treated him negatively.

At the beginning of 1933, the German student organization, the Deutsche Studentenschaft (DSt) asked Herrmann to make his blacklist of "harmful and undesirable literature" available to them; it then became the foundation for the book burnings. Decades of research into the Nazi era has found neither the book burnings of May 10, 1933 nor the blacklist created by Herrmann to have been commissioned or directed by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The first "List of Books Worth Burning" appeared in the publication, Berliner Nachtausgabe on March 26, 1933. Preliminary and incomplete, it was soon replaced by a more thorough index. A month later, Herrmann began creating further lists of authors based on his blacklist, which he sent to the DSt for their "Action against the Un-German Spirit". Using these lists, student shock troops searched the libraries of universities and institutions and, beginning May 6, 1933, bookshops and lending libraries, removing the "harmful and undesirable literature". Public libraries were then pressured to "clean up" their own stocks; the books culled were to be handed over to the DSt for public book burnings on May 10, 1933.

Herrmann's blacklist was republished on May 16, 1933, in Börsenblatt, a weekly trade publication for German bookstores, as Prussia's first official list of banned books.

In 1931, he went to work at the Stettin municipal library, lasting only months in the position before he was let go in October. Also in 1931, he applied for admission into the Nazi Party, where he was aligned with the party's left wing under brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser. In 1933, at the age of 29, he headed the Zentralstelle für das deutsche Bibliothekswesen in Berlin. In April 1934, he became the library director in Königsberg, Prussia. In 1936, he became the political leader.

Herrmann was born in Alsleben. While still in school, he joined the Deutschvölkischer Jugendbund. He studied modern history at the University of Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1928. In 1929, he worked at the Volksbibliothek in Breslau and became involved in library policy in line with a Nazi outlook.

Wolfgang Herrmann (March 14, 1904 – April 1945 near Brno) was a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933.