This study presents an in-depth examination of book policies during the Nazi era in the context of modern mass media and is based on a number of published and unpublished sources. It reconstructs the policies of book sponsorship in the areas of conflict oscillating between political interests and long-standing ties with tradition, between ideological imperatives and market-based terms, between totalitarian pretenses and a modern, discerning society. At the same time the analysis documents the effects of this conflict in the occasionally contradictory policy discourses about the diversified field of literature between 1933 und 1945.