Day and night, groups of people can be seen staring at the ground of Bebelplatz, a broad plaza in the centre of Berlin. To those not in the know it must seem comic, to those in the know it is fitting.
It was here, on May 11th, 1933, that students of the Humboldt University brought the thousands of volumes they had stolen from libraries around the city on the orders of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He had compiled a list of 160 "un-German" authors that included Thomas Mann, Erich Kastner and Kurt Tucholsky, and other foreign authors including Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells. At midnight, the students gathered on the rain-soaked plaza opposite the main university building, piled the books high on a ceremonial log pyre and drenched them with petrol. After some difficulty the pyre was set alight, and within seconds the flames consumed some of world's greatest works of literature.
"Every few minutes another howling mob arrived, adding more books to the impressive pyre," wrote Louis P. Lochner of the Associated Press. "As night fell, students from the university performed veritable Indian dances and incantations as the flames began to soar skywards."
The excitement reached its peak when Joseph Goebbels arrived and stepped up to the microphone to speak. "Fellow students, German men and women, the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended," he said, praising the students for their hard work in "clearing up the debris of the past".
Today the book-burning is commemorated with a memorial called "The Empty Library" at the centre of Bebelplatz. A window set in the ground reveals a dazzling white room with four walls of floor-to ceiling bookshelves, all empty. The memorial is understated, but chilling. Late at night, the white glow emanating from below the ground draws passers-by to bear witness to the night when more than 20,000 books were burned in Berlin. A nearby plaque contains the prophetic words of the 19th-century Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine: "Where they start by burning books, they'll end by burning people."
