There is evidently more to the reception of translations than a consideration of the faithfulness and beauty of the translator’s work. In Nazi librarians’ journals, translation is regarded as a potential danger to the integrity of the target language (TL) community, a danger often framed in terms of contamination and invasion. In this paper, the author examines some reviews and articles on translations into German during the National Socialist (NS) period, focusing on the attitudes to translation present in these texts as illustrative of different stances towards the importation of ‘foreign’ elements into the TL culture. Investigating the discourse on translation in the period, the author leaves aside the study of the translations themselves. The interest is in what Toury calls ‘preliminary norms’ – decisions on what and why to translate, and how translations fit into the surrounding cultural landscape – rather than the ‘operational’ norms that govern how texts are translated.