The Wehrmacht Exhibition: Collectives and Controversies
From 1995, the Wehrmacht Exhibition (Wehrmachtsausstellung) opened its doors to 800,000 visitors across Germany and Austria.
This visual display concentrated on the role of the Nazi German army (Wehrmacht), exploring their actions on the Eastern Front during World War Two. The exhibition’s provocative narrative accused the German army of perpetrating atrocities on the battlefields, as well as implying that the majority of its soldiers had been integral to genocide. Its full running title was: ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the German Army, 1941–1944’.
To most Western readers in the twenty-first century, the argument above probably seems neither shocking nor surprising. Similarly, the war crime allegations were nothing new to German historians at the time either. So, why did this hit the German public like a bombshell?
Ultimately, the project’s controversy could be boiled down to two major reasons: the sources that were used and the challenge that they posed for Germany’s collective memory of the war.
Let’s start with the “controversial” evidence. In the exhibition there was a heavy photographic emphasis, with it comprising of around 1,400 pitcures in total. Many of these sources had become newly available since the opening of Soviet archives shortly after the end of the Cold War. The photographs illustrated numerous acts of Wehrmacht barbarism, including shootings, executions, hangings and deportations.
Contention arose when Hannes Heer (employed by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research) and others who were involved were accused of manipulating sources, falsifying evidence and skewing the conclusions that were being made. What were the grounds for these indictments? Michael Tymkiw has highlighted that fact that within the exhibition the images were organised into 6 different categories, such as ‘Tormenting Jews’ and ‘Captivity’, which to some extent meant that the images all lost their distinct specificities. They became a part of a more generic, and potentially distorted, picture.
On top of this, some historians at the time, such as Krisztián Ungváry, asserted that only 10% of the photographs actually depicted any crimes of the Wehrmacht. The rest were supposedly showing other groups’ offences, such as those of the Soviet NKVD. This mislabelling accusation suddenly brought on wider attacks surrounding the credibility of photographic evidence, raising issues that were related to broader problems within the History discipline, alongside the criticisms that were unique to this exhibition too.
These charges were initially damning. The exhibition was closed in 1999 and a public enquiry was set up to investigate these oppositional claims. A subsequent report, published in 2000, found that in fact the exhibition did not “contain any forgeries with respect to the key issues” and that there were only a few inaccuracies with a small handful of the photographs.
Despite this verdict, alterations were still recommended for the second run of the exhibition, which reopened in 2001. These changes included a less inflammatory exhibition title, fewer photographs (only 10% of those in original collection) and, perhaps most importantly, more contextual information to accompany the pictures. Indeed, from an academic perspective, a key critique of the photographic displays had been that the images were not very informative without their context. This textual absence definitely accounted for some of the controversy that the exhibition had experienced, especially within the historical community. But there was something more going on here…
The public’s outrage had far deeper roots than merely source type and framing. The crucial detail, that triggered this horrified reaction, was that the exhibition had openly confronted the unblemished reputation of the Wehrmacht within Germany’s collective memory. This view is now more widely known as the myth of the “clean hands” of the Wehrmacht.
This moral ideal was first conceived by the International Military Tribunals in the 1940s, which had found the Wehrmacht not to be a criminal organisation, in contrast to other groups, such as the SS. Yet, in this showcase, it wasn’t the commonly condemned SS under fire. Instead, these graphic pictures were implicating many of the “ordinary” German soldiers.
This jolted the nation. Former West Germans, in particular, had been socialised into a victimhood mentality by the occupying powers in the post-war years. They had diverted attention away from any personal culpability for the Holocaust. The silence of the Wehrmacht’s crimes in Western-occupied Germany had been permitted in order to rebuild and democratise the state, whilst in Soviet-occupied Germany it was done to maintain their new socialist identity, as Mary Nolan has explained.
Remember, this exhibition was not presenting any evidence that had been unbeknown to the historical community. Indeed, attempts to academically “come to terms” with the genocidal past had started in the previous decade during Historikerstreit (a debate between conservative and left-of-centre intellectuals in West Germany, about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into their historiography). However, this exhibition had now abruptly projected the Wehrmacht directly into the public arena.
Historians such as Alaric Searle have questioned this preceding silence. He has suggested that the Generals’ Trials from 1954 onwards had already begun to show some attempts to address the Wehrmacht’s crimes in the West, but certainly in the East, this was never discussed. Truly, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the “clean hands” myth was shattered by this exhibition.
“I can’t believe that. I can’t believe it. They were shot at, they had to defend themselves… they had to. I don’t believe these pictures of arbitrary shootings and hangings. I don’t believe my uncles are murderers. I don’t believe my grandfather was a murderer either. I can’t believe it. Otherwise I would have to hang myself.”
(A woman visiting the exhibition in Vienna, 1995)
The shared narrative of innocence was a long-standing, deeply-rooted phenomenon. At the time of the exhibition, there were around 1.7 million veteran soldiers still alive, plus their close friends and families, who had all upheld this favourable story for decades. The stark divergence and attack that the exhibition then brought upon them perhaps makes the protests unsurprising. Many of the dissenters were former Wehrmacht veterans themselves. In Munich there were some 300,000 households signing a petition to close down the exhibition, as well as an attempted bombing by right-wing extremists when it visited Saarbrücken in 1999. Clearly, there was a dissonance revealing itself, between the prevailing collective belief and these new memories that were being presented.
Interestingly, after the uproar and the investigation’s recommendations, the focus of the showcase did actually shift. It gave more time towards exposing the lead officers of the Wehrmacht, with less concern for the average soldier. In many ways, this meant that the exhibition still ended up reinforcing the original claims of the Wehrmacht myth — the ordinary soliders were “clean”. The fewer protests that the renewed exhibition generated arguably demonstrated that the army’s innocence did sit more comfortably within the nation’s collective memory.
The exhibition’s tempestuous reaction had signified that innocence myths still persisted within recollections of Germany’s Nazi past, despite increasing attempts to grapple with it. As Gabiel Fawcett remarks, many Germans “saw it as a slur on the whole generation of soldiers’’. This personal offence ignited the controversy, making the exhibition a site of both public and academic scrutiny. The emotional responses drew the attention of scholars and led to the additional disputes that arose surrounding its photographic sources. Without the initial contrast to the nationally-fed narrative, the exhibition would have been unlikely to have caused the same whirlwind of scandal.
The Wehrmachtsausstellung undoubtedly offered a turning point for the country’s Holocaust perpetration consciousness. The exhibition was the soap that a reunited Germany needed in the 1990s, for a fresh reflection upon their muddied war-time past. However, this certainly did not mean that it was welcomed with open arms.