The thesis treats how the German public libraries originated and how they were affected by the Nazi era. It deals with how the library system began to cover the whole nation, and describes the struggle between public libraries and commercial and religious ditto. It also treats the weedings out and what happened to the staff and the stocks between 1933 and 1945. Furthermore it gives a picture of what books one could find in a German public library, and how these volumes were catalogued and classified. Moreover it describes how the libraries managed during the Second World War, and ends by giving some topics for discussion and asks questions that additional research might be able to answer.