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On the evening of May 10, 1933, fires lit up all of Germany. In Berlin's Opera Arena, forty thousand people gathered to hear the fiery speech of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, in which he declared that the fire marked the end of the decadent cultural life of the Weimar Republic. The fire consumed books by Marx, Mann, Brecht, and Hemingway. But behind the book burnings lies another, less well-known story: that of the Nazis looting thousands of libraries and stealing millions of books in occupied countries. Two fearsome men, SS commander Heinrich Himmler and Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, competed to subjugate Europe's literary heritage. Himmler collected a huge library on "enemies of the Reich" at the SS headquarters in Berlin. Theorist Alfred Rosenberg's plan was more ambitious, as it aimed to lay the foundations for an entirely new Nazi research and university system. There, the future leadership elite of the Third Reich would be nurtured, creating a series of new research institutes to justify invasions and genocides of Jews, Roma, and political enemies. In The Book Thieves, Anders Riedel tells the story of one of the Nazis' most terrifying projects. He traveled the European continent, following in the footsteps of thieves in search of lost libraries and the unknown fate of stolen books. The novel was translated into many languages, and published in the United States of America, China, Japan, Spain, Brazil, and others. It won many awards, the most recent of which was the Heslepress Award for Best Historical Novel in Spain in 2022.