National Socialist laws and public policy towards the arts were intended to defend a particular nationalistic conception of German history. The National Socialists, by making their leader the 'highest source of law' (Schmitt), conflated the concept of law as created in legislative processes with the idea of law relevant to aesthetic judgement and artistic creation, thus providing legality and legitimacy for their policy. The laws which suppressed modernist art were both part of a wider suppression of alternative ideas and a defence of a restrictive notion of Aryan personhood and ideology. The burning of books, of art and of persons was at heart the cleansing, through fire, of those elements not considered compatible with the National Socialist view of the future.
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