"We, and I say that deliberately: We as representatives of the booksellers association actively participated in the book burnings," Alexander Skipis, managing director of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association - which existed at the time of the book burnings - told DW. Many students participated in the burning of 'un-German' literature Image: Getty Images/Keystoneīut it was not only there that people participated enthusiastically. They found a number of willing helpers in that endeavor, especially at the universities and colleges themselves. Their cry: "The state has been conquered, but not the universities." And that became the call to arms with which the Nazis set out to subjugate Germany's intellectual institutions in the spring of 1933. Groundwork for the event was laid by Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and two rival, yet politically loyal, student organizations. For the book burnings organized by the Nazis in 1933, just months after Adolf Hitler came to power, were just the beginning of a persecution that would force hundreds of authors into exile and cost others their lives. Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." The words that German poet Heinrich Heine wrote in his tragedy Almansor some 100 years earlier, would, under the Nazis, become a tragic reality.
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