Wolfgang Herrmann (librarian)

[note 1] At the beginning of 1933, the German student organization, the Deutsche Studentenschaft (DSt) asked Herrmann to make his blacklist of "harmful and undesirable literature" available to them; it then became the foundation for the book burnings.

[4] Decades of research into the Nazi era has found neither the book burnings of 10 May 1933 nor the blacklist created by Herrmann to have been commissioned or directed by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Not until later did Goebbels and his Ministry – after a long power struggle with Alfred Rosenberg – assume sole guidance of literature policy.

A month later, Herrmann began creating further lists of authors based on his blacklist, which he sent to the DSt for their "Action against the Un-German Spirit".

Herrmann's blacklist was republished on 16 May 1933 in Börsenblatt, a weekly trade publication for German bookstores, as Prussia's first official list of banned books.