6. a small strip of coloured cloth signifying membership of an order or award of military decoration, prize, or other distinction. 7. a small, usually looped, strip of coloured cloth worn to signify support for a charity or cause: a red AIDS ribbon.
The books burned were Jewish, Marxist, Bolshevik, or other disreputable or non-German books. These included the works of Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Jack London and Margaret Sanger.
I also recalled, for an American radio station, our own book burning, when we, members of a Jewish youth group, rushed to our club room in the wake of the first arrests of 1935 to burn indexed books, for fear they would be found by the Gestapo. We were, of course, not alone.