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Late at night on May 10, 1933 the Nazis burned more than 25,000 books deemed "un-German" in elaborate productions across the country, foreshadowing the Nuremberg laws and eventually the Holocaust.

Through the summer, the New Brunswick Free Public Library will host a traveling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that focuses on this pivotal moment in history and the American response.

On June 15, the exhibit, "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings," opened with presentations by Steven Luckert, curator of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Douglas Greenberg, executive dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University who previously served as the head of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The burnings, Luckert explained, were not spontaneous, populist uprisings, but rather "elaborate stagecraft" orchestrated by the government, namely by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

"Nazi book burning was public theater that employed pageantry, lighting, and a cast of thousands," he said.

In Berlin, for example, the book burning was preceded by a procession of university students who marched throughout the city streets with torches as a band played German folk music. Occurring at midnight, floodlights were set up to create the proper atmosphere and then Goebbels delivered a fiery speech in which he described the burning as an act of freedom for Germany from "decadent Jewish intellectualism" and compared the event to the nailing of Luther's 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church.

Works by Jewish, Marxist, and other liberal writers were the main targets of the burnings.

Whereas the Nazis proclaimed the burning a protest against tyranny, American and European intellectuals as well as the Jewish community "saw it as a return to the dark past of inquisition, persecution, and intolerance," Luckert said.

The burnings were in part intended to send the message to German writers that only approved literature would be published in the Third Reich and those who deviated would face consequences, Luckert noted.

Mass protests erupted in the United States against the Nazi book burnings, Luckert said, which, for Americans, became an "enduring symbol" of hate and prejudice and the response an exemplification of the U.S.'s commitment to freedom and democracy.

Greenberg's speech looked at book burning from a "broad historical perspective."

"Literate civilization is almost as replete with book burning as it is with book writing," he said.

The first recorded book burning occurred in China in 213 B.C.E. when all philosophy and history books were burned along with the live burial of intellectuals, Greenberg noted. Greeks and Athenians also frequently burned books, as did the Romans who burned Jewish and early Christian texts, especially the Gospels.

Greenberg related how during the Spanish Inquisition, Hebrew and Arabic texts were burned and when the Spanish discovered the New World Mayan texts were also burned. In early America, Puritans burned Quaker books and in the 18th century rabbis burned works by the kabbalists, he added.

"It's hard to imagine a literate civilization that hasn't burned books," he said, noting that even today some communities in the U.S. have burned "Harry Potter" books.

"Not only in authoritarian states does this happen," he added. "Even democracies do this."

When books are burned, Greenberg said, the enemy is not the book, but "the ideas that are in the book, or the ideas we think are in the book."

Greenberg suggested that book burning is a form of murder or "bibliocide" as he called it.

"Murdering a book -- burning a book -- is really murdering an idea," he said.

But because ideas do not originate in books and ideas are carried in many different forms other than books, "burning a book is rarely sufficient to destroy an idea."

"The real goal is to get rid of the people who come up with the ideas," he said.

"Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings," will be at the New Brunswick Free Public Library (60 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick) through Aug. 10. The exhibition will be open to the public Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Thursday evenings 6-9 p.m.; and Saturdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; or by appointment.