Undampered by a chilly drizzle, some 40,000 Germans jammed the square between Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University and the Opera House looking at a black mass of criss-crossed logs, insulated from the pavement by sand. A thumping band blared out old military marches. Toward midnight a procession entered the square, headed by officers of the University's student dueling corps in their dress uniforms: blue tunics, white breeches, plush tam o'shanters and spurred patent leather jack boots. Behind them came other students and a line of motor trucks piled high with books. More students clung to the trucks, waving flaring torches that they hurled through the air at the log pile. Blue flames of gasoline shot up, the pyre blazed. One squad of students formed a chain from the pyre to the trucks. Then came the books, passed from hand to hand while a leather-lunged student roared out the names of the authors:
"Erich Maria Remarque [wild cheering]—for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal!"
"Emil Ludwig—burned for literary rascality and high treason against Germany."
"Sigmund Freud—for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures. . . ."
On he went, calling out the names of practically every modern German author with whom the outside world is familiar: Karl Marx, Jakob Wassermann, Albert Einstein, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger. Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Walther Rathenau.
Burned, but not condemned to the crowd, were books by several U. S. authors: Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, John Dos Passes, Ex-Judge Ben Lindsey.
While the flames flared highest, up to a little flag-draped rostrum stumped clubfooted, wild-eyed little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in the Nazi Cabinet, organizer of the great midnight bibliocaust.
"Jewish intellectualism is dead!" cried he. "National Socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself!
"These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old etra, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. . . . The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts. ... As you had the right to destroy the books, you had the duty to support the government. The fire signals to the entire world that the November revolutionaries have sunk to earth and a new spirit has arisen!"
All over Germany similar pyres blazed with similar books. In the Romerberg, Frankfurt's medieval marketplace, a band played Chopin's Funeral March during the firing. In Munich only 100 books were burned, yanked from the shelves of the University library. Breslau boasted that it burned 5,000 Ib. of heretical works, Kiel burned 2,000 volumes.