The German Student Union organized the burnings as an "action against the un-German spirit", weeks after Hitler took power. Students had looted libraries and bookshops for works by writers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Erich Maria Remarque and Heinrich Heine. In Berlin, torchlit processions brought the books to the square, where Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared that the era of "extreme Jewish intellectualism" was over. The burnings became an emblem of Nazi censorship.
The campaign was planned by students rather than by the government, but the regime embraced it. In April 1933 the German Student Union issued twelve theses against the "un-German spirit", and students compiled blacklists and raided libraries, including the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, whose collection was carted away days before the burning.
On the night of May 10, students in uniform marched through Berlin by torchlight to the square opposite the university. As the books were thrown on the pyre, speakers called out "fire oaths" condemning each author by name. Goebbels arrived around midnight and addressed a crowd of tens of thousands. Rain in several cities delayed or damped down the fires, but burnings took place in more than 30 university towns that spring.
One of the condemned authors, the novelist Erich Kästner, stood in the crowd and watched his own books burn. The works of Heinrich Heine were also thrown on the fire. A century earlier, in his play Almansor, Heine had written: "Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too." A memorial of empty bookshelves beneath the square now marks the site.
Key people: Joseph Goebbels, Erich Kästner