“The paper burns, but the words fly away.”
Ben Joseph Akiba, Jewish Palestinian religious leader (A.D. C. 50-C.135)

It was on this date, May 10, 1933, in Berlin that about 20,000 books were burned during a student rally as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The suppression of free speech and ideas was a tactic of Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. The target this time was anti-Nazi, Jewish-authored, and so-called “degenerate” books, but suppression of ideas by the burning of books, often culminating in the burning of people (as Heinrich Heine famously observed), is an old idea. The Nazis were neither the first nor the most comprehensive book-burners in history. The rationale never changes, but the irony of censorship by book-burning remains the same: you have to inflict the harm (read the book) before you can judge that harm can be inflicted.