11 Movie Mistakes Only Smug Nerds Would Ever Notice
4. Indy's Book Burning Caper Was 5 Years Too Late
Another triumph for the most diligent history nerds, this revelation centres on the key sequence in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade that sees Indy and his father travel to Berlin to retrieve Senior's Grail Diary. The date is 1938, and Hitler's forces are holding a bookburning rally at the Institute of Aryan Culture in Berlin, destroying texts deemed counter to Nazi ideology in huge fires.
Among their number is Elsa Schneider, who brought the diary with her from Castle Brunwald to Berlin. Indy manages to take the book back only to find himself confronted by Hitler, who comically confuses Indy for a fan, and signs the diary as a memento.
It's a great moment, but sadly it was impossible, since the real Nazi book burnings, which were conducted by the German Student Association of Nazi Germany took place in 1933, burning any authors whose names were blacklisted as liberal, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, communist, or Jewish, or whose work was viewed as subversive or contrary to the Nazi administration.
So, Indy was a good five years too late.