Lost Illusions of the Wehrmacht

Reel back to the most divisive museum show of the recent American past: the Smithsonian Institution’s attempt to display the aircraft Enola Gay and highlight what was for many the moral dilemma of the United States’ decision to drop the world’s first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Next, imagine that, instead of the exhibit’s organizers watering things down when attacked--as the Smithsonian did--they not only stood their ground on the exhibit’s contents, but also took their wrenching photos and oral histories on the road to a still more symbolically charged venue: Independence Hall.

That’s akin to what’s happening in Germany this month. The chilling photo exhibit “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44” will travel, fresh from a controversial appearance in Munich, to Frankfurt. There it will open at the Paulskirche, the church where this country’s first constitution was drafted in 1848.

Two world wars and five constitutions later, the Paulskirche remains a vital symbol of democratic idealism, and the hope that this country has put the sins of the past behind it forever.

It would be hard to come up with an exhibition that does more to undermine the nation’s self-confidence. “War of Annihilation” rips away any remaining shreds of honor from one of the few wartime institutions that Germans believed they could still be proud of: their regular armed forces, the Wehrmacht.

It’s long been an article of faith--and no small source of comfort--that the Wehrmacht was a relatively clean organization during World War II and that the unthinkable cruelties of the Holocaust were dreamed up and carried out by the SS and other Nazi organizations--not the army.

But “War of Annihilation” uses period photographs--many from the Wehrmacht’s archives--to show, again and again, low-ranking conscripts willingly executing Jews, Gypsies, prisoners of war and others, en masse.

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Even more searing are the letters that often accompany the photos: missives home that openly, unashamedly, and even proudly describe the large-scale killings of the defenseless.

“War of Annihilation” has been on the road through Germany and Austria for nearly two years; it had aroused little controversy until February, when it reached Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany’s conservative heartland.

Suddenly, veterans groups were calling for a public boycott. The Bavarian state minister of culture advised schoolteachers to keep pupils away. One prominent politician snapped that exhibition co-organizer and tobacco heir Jan Philipp Reemtsma instead should do a show on the evils of smoking. The photos were said to be faked. Neo-Nazis marched.

Perhaps most extraordinary, 10 citizens filed criminal complaints against Reemtsma and his co-organizer, historian Hannes Heer, charging “incitement of the people” and other hate crimes. The Bavarian public prosecutor is now obliged to conduct a formal investigation.

Politicians in Frankfurt have been watching the goings-on in Munich, and some now say they don’t want “War of Annihilation” to go on display there. Local members of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the coalition leader in the lower house of parliament, tried to organize a counter-event but abandoned the idea for fear it would only encourage extremists to march again.

Frankfurt Mayor Petra Roth has refused to preside at the opening of the exhibit, declaring: “Whoever calls the Wehrmacht a criminal organization, in general, insults millions of soldiers who have done their duties and followed their orders.”

But other public figures--notably the Frankfurt-based leader of Germany’s Jewish community--support the show.