On 10 May 1933, students at the University of Berlin threw 25,000 books on a large pyre located in the square in front of the university. In the days that followed, gleeful students mounted book burnings at all the major universities in Germany. Newspapers from as far afield as China and Japan printed photographic and descriptive images of this violence. The world sensed that some kind of terrible rupture of civilization was taking place in the country of Dichter und Denker (poets and philosophers). Not a few journalists remembered the poet Heinrich Heine's prediction a century earlier: ‘Where one burns books, one soon will burn people’.

There is some controversy over the books being burned at these universities. They may have been books promoting "perversions", etc.