Methodology for Compiling Historical Author Lists from Nazi-era Sources

fame. People whose names did not appear in the cohorts for the time periods in question (1925-1933, 1933-1945, and 1955-1965) were eliminated from the analysis. The cohorts we generated were based on four major sources, and their content is given in Appendix. 1) The Hermann lists The lists of the infamous librarian Wolfgang Hermann were originally published in a librarianship journal and later in Boersenblatt, a publishing industry magazine in Germany. They are reproduced in Ref $11. A digital version is available on the German-language version of Wikipedia (Ref $12). We considered digitizing Ref $10 by hand to ensure accuracy, but felt that both OCR and manual entry would be time- consuming and error prone. Consequently, we began with the list available on Wikipedia and hired a manual annotator to compare this list with the version appearing in Ref $11 to ensure the accuracy of the resulting list. The annotator did not have access to our data and made these decisions purely on the basis of the text of Ref $11. The following changes were made: Literature 1) “Fjodor Panfjorow’ was changed to “Fjodor Panferov”. 2) “Nelly Sachs” was deleted. History 1) “Hegemann W. Ellwald, Fr. v.” was changed to “W. Hegemann” and “Fr. Von Hellwald” Art 4) “Paul Stefan” was deleted. Philosophy/Religion 1) “Max Nitsche’” was deleted. The results of this manual correction process were used as our lists for Politics, Literature, Literary History, History, Art-related Writers, and Philosophy/Religion. 2) The Berlin list The lists of Hermann continued to be expanded by the Nazi regime. We also analyzed a version from 1938 (Ref $13). This version was digitized by the City of Berlin to mark the 75" year after the book burnings in 2008 (Ref S14). The list of authors appearing on the website occasionally included multiple authors on a single line, or errors in which the author field did not actually contain the name of a person who wrote the text. These were corrected by hand to create an initial list. We noted that many authors were listed only using a last name and a first initial. Our manual annotator attempted to determine the full name of any such author. The results were far from comprehensive, but did lead us to expand the dataset somewhat; names with only first initials were replaced by the full name wherever possible. Some authors were listed using a pseudonym, and on several occasions our manual annotator was able to determine the real name of the author who used a given pseudonym. In this case, the real name was added to the list. In addition, we occasionally included multiple spelling variants for a single author. Because of this, and because an author’s real name and pseudonym may both be included on the list, the number of author names on the list very slightly exceeds the number of individuals being examined. The numbers reported in the figure are the number of names on the list. It is worth pointing out that Adolf Hitler appears as an author of one of the banned books from 1938. This is due to a French version of Mein Kampf, together with commentary, which was banned by the Nazi authorities. Although it is extremely peculiar to find Hitler on a list of banned authors, we did not remove Hitlers name, as we had no basis for doing so from the standpoint of the technical authorship and name criteria described above: Adolf Hitler is indeed listed as the author of a book that was banned by the Nazi regime. This is consistent with our stance throughout the paper, which is that we avoided making judgments ourselves that could bias the outcome of our results. Instead, we relied strictly upon our 27 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017035