All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque — Banned in Nazi Germany
Erich Maria Remarque's famous anti-war book about the grinding, brutal fighting in the WWI trenches was a bit too realistic for Hitler. The Nazis banned the book for allegedly denigrating the German war effort and for being a "degenerate book." Fascists tossed All Quiet on the Western Front into some of their earliest book bonfires.
Remarque, himself a veteran of WWI, had to flee Germany, but his sister stayed behind. In 1943, the Nazis arrested her and said, "Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach — you, however, will not escape us." They beheaded her for "undermining morale."
Not content with taking her head off, Berlin added a particularly vicious twist by billing the expatriate author 90 marks for the executioner's trouble.
The author never said or wrote much about Elfriede, even his diaries. But years later, Erich Remarque dedicated his novel about life in a concentration camp, Spark of Life, to his late sister. Today, there's a street named for Elfriede in the Remarques' native Osnabruck.
Remarque lived to the age of 72. His book on the destructiveness and senselessness of war lives on still.
