We have come to understand the Third Reich as a “polycratic” regime of rival bureaucratic fiefdoms endlessly battling over turf. The only arbiter was Adolf Hitler, who preserved his own authority by allowing his lieutenants to squabble among themselves, even if doing so resulted in grotesquely inefficient administration. Nowhere is that entropy better illustrated than in the realm of censorship, wherein literature collided with, and was wrecked by, politics. In what was supposed to be a dictatorship, who exactly was in charge was never clear, and chaos was normal. Consequently, Lewy’s new history of Nazi censorship inevitably reads like a collaboration between George Orwell and Lewis Carroll—oppressive, wildly inconsistent, and based on ludicrous or impenetrable logic.
Nazi censorship began with the notorious book burnings of 1933, which were carried out spontaneously by student vigilantes. Josef Goebbels had little involvement, perhaps because he realized the events would not play well abroad....