On May 10, 1933, at the University of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels and other members of the National Socialist Party assembled for their first mass book burning.  Forty thousand people watched as twenty-five thousand books were burned as a way of protecting Germany from what Goebbels called “the intellectual garbage of the past.”  One of the books targeted was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front because of its anti-German message. All Quiet on the Western Front ran against what Goebbels saw as the sanctioned history of the Great War because it placed blame on the German government and it exposed flaws in the German account.  Yet, the novel resonated widely with the public.