Even now, nearly 80 years and worlds later, the images are chilling: dozens of bright-eyed young men hurling books into a bonfire in Berlin in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.

Just burning the books wasn’t enough; first they were defiled by loading them onto carts filled with manure. Before they were through, 25,000 books were destroyed, an introduction to flames that would eventually consume millions of human beings.

The offense was grievous - the books had an “un-German spirit,” and the students objected to their “Jewish intellectualism.”

The authors form a roll call of early 20h century literature: Emil Ludwig, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Helen Keller.

Helen Keller?

She, like many of the others, was a pacifist, a socialist, anti-war.

By 1939, 575 authors had been forbidden in Germany.

This horror show is the subject of “Banned and Burned: Literary Censorship and the Loss of Freedom,” presented by the United States Holocaust Museum. It’s a slightly cursory but still sobering exhibit at the Mandel Library in Downtown West Palm Beach, on view on the 4th floor through January 6th.

Most of the exhibit consists of a series of panels that make it easier to move the exhibit from place to place, but it is the 40 minutes or so of videos that bring the period alive, that document both the burnings and the reaction to the burnings.

“This is the only venue in Southeast Florida that has the exhibit,” says Lyn Harris, who’s on the library’s Board of Directors.

What the Germans did constitutes its own encyclopedia of bestiality - Thomas Mann referred to it as an episode of “national drunkenness,” although the phrase is rendered trivial by what came after. Americans rose up and held counter marches, and American intellectuals and writers responded with appropriate outrage. As Archibald MacLeish wrote, books are weapons, which is something that Hitler also understood - otherwise why try to destroy them?

Among the videos is an excerpt from a 1939 episode of “The March of Time” that shows how perfect was the parody of it in “Citizen Kane,” a clip from MGM’s anti-Nazi film “The Mortal Storm,” the famous episode of “The Twilight Zone” starring Burgess Meredith as a librarian in a totalitarian state, and scenes from Truffaut’s haunting adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

In the Truffaut film, Cyril Cusack’s captain expains to Oskar Werner’s Montag that burning books makes everybody’s life a little easier. After all, books, he explains, have the power to make people “unhappy with their own lives.” Why not just save them the trouble of all that sweaty pondering and fretting?

It’s easy to look at the exhibit from the wrong end of history’s telescope and feel smug; much less easy after you realize that the impulse to destroy what disturbs never goes away, whether it’s a random group of backwoods Baptists banning “The Catcher in the Rye” or “Slaughterhouse Five,” for being insufficiently respectful of authority, or Muslims declaring a fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

“This kind of censorship is alive and well today,” says Leslie Hogan, who is also on the library Board. For instance: this year, the Brevard County Library banned the “50 Shades of Gray” trilogy, then later rescinded their initial decision.

The dog of authoritarian intolerance is always in danger of going into heat.