From April 12, 1933, the National Socialist German Student Association and the German student body launched a campaign against the works of Marxist, democratic and pacifist writers. After the "12 Theses Against the Un-German Spirit" had been distributed throughout the Reich and the corresponding lists drawn up, the publications of the ostracized authors were systematically removed from university, institute and other libraries, from public and private lending libraries as well as from bookshops and private book stocks. Public book burnings were then to be organized in all university towns on the evening of 10 May.

This affected works by Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Bertha von Suttner, Erich Maria Remarque and Erich Kästner, as well as Stefan Zweig, Carl von Ossietzky, Joseph Roth, Kurt Tucholsky, Anna Seghers and many others, including non-German authors. Around 25,000 volumes were thrown into the flames on Berlin's Opernplatz alone.

In 21 other cities, equally macabre actions were staged in the light of torches and pyres. In addition, so-called non-student book burnings had already been taking place in Berlin and several other cities since mid-March, occasionally in front of buildings or institutions of the labor movement, which had long been massively persecuted by the Nazi rulers.

In Wiesbaden, for example, the home of the Biebricher Fabrikarbeiter-Verband in Mainzer Straße was stormed and demolished by an armed SA and SS troop on March 10, with packs of leaflets and trade union newspapers thrown into the courtyard and set on fire. In the course of the smashing operation against the Social Democratic trade union federations carried out throughout the Reich at ten o'clock in the morning on 2 May 1933, all files, advertising brochures and other written materials were also taken out of the offices of the Volkshaus at Wellritzstraße 49, now the Konrad-Arndt-Haus, by SA men and set on fire in the street, as was all the socially critical literature in the organization library there. The leader of the action was the district leader of the National Socialist Company Cell Organization, Franz Weismantel.

However, some works and several organizational flags had been hidden shortly beforehand. As it was now becoming clear to the activists of the workers' movement in particular that the discovery of books and brochures, especially by Jewish authors with communist, socialist and democratic views, would inevitably be extremely detrimental to them in the event of house searches, they soon either took care of their destruction themselves or moved such publications to more inconspicuous quarters, namely to family members, friends or reliable acquaintances.

Georg Buch, for example, managed to save certain parts of his private library as well as the organizational library of the local Socialist Workers' Youth, while the remaining documents were confiscated during two police raids. The library of the small Wiesbaden local branch of the Free Workers' Union of Germany - Anarcho-Syndicalists was hidden in the attic of a house in Rheinstraße. Furthermore, after the dissolution of the Wiesbaden chapter of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, Georg Feller was not only able to keep its flag safe with his sister in Schiersteiner Straße, but also saved several bound volumes of the "Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung".

In a completely different way, the owner of the Schwarz lending library at Bleichstraße 18 saved a not inconsiderable part of his book stock from confiscation and destruction by selling it in good time to trustworthy regular customers.

The holdings of the then Nassau State Library were subject to a special book and user ban for literature that was undesirable and listed by the Nazi regime. On the other hand, Nazi literature had to be systematically supplemented there. The same must have happened to the holdings of the lending libraries maintained by the Volksbildungsverein Wiesbaden until the late summer of 1934, as well as its reading room, which was operated in the former Elly Heuss School until the association was dissolved at the beginning of 1936, although there is no reliable information on this.

The ➞ Wiesbaden City Archives hold a small number of books that survived the period of persecution in various hiding places, as well as a small collection of material with references to them.