One scene in The Mortal Storm stood out to me, because it made me curious. It occurse one evening as the Nazis gather around a large fire to burn books.
The two books that we see them incinerate are by Heinrich Heine and Albert Einstein. Each author was chosen for a specific reason.
I understood immediately why Einstein was chosen. Science, being an objective observer of truth, is the natural enemy of fascists.
For example, it is no coincidence that the current U.S. government is defunding science on a massive scale. Of course that is a direct attack on something that is truly great about America — and a key source of our economic power in the World.
But our current administration doesn’t care about any of that. It thinks more along the North Korean model: Keep your people poor and illiterate, and thereby maintain absolute control of the nation that you have ruined.
But what about Heine? I spent quite a bit of time today reading about him, and I highly recommend that you do the same. A good starting point might be his Wikipedia page.
Among his many other accomplishments, Heine coined the phrase “Where books burn, so do people.” Of course such a man would need to be silenced.