"Exhibiting Violence" in Berlin | Remember, remember...

On the evening of June 9, 1942, members of the SS, the German "Schutzpolizei," and the Gestapo surrounded Lidice , a village in the Czech Republic. The next morning, they shot all 173 male residents. The women, 195 in total, were separated from their children and deported to Ravensbrück. Lidice was set on fire; some children were taken to a "Lebensborn" home, a pet project of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, for the purpose of "Germanization," while others were deported to the Kulmhof extermination camp and gassed. This was "revenge" for the assassination attempt by Czech resistance fighters on the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. After the war, a unique search began for the missing children of Lidice.

Change of place and time: June 10, 1944. The SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" attacks the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and murders almost all of its inhabitants: 643 men, women, children, and the elderly. First the men, then the women and children, are burned alive in the village church. Declared to be "retaliation" for an action by the French resistance, the village is razed to the ground. After the liberation from German fascism, the ruins are declared a historical monument, and Oradour is rebuilt not far from the site of the crime.

Lidice and Oradour, two places that became symbols of unbounded inhumanity, representative of countless sites of German crimes throughout Europe, many of which only became known after the end of the war. The German Historical Museum in Berlin is commemorating six early exhibitions on the horrors of the Nazi occupation with a new special exhibition. DHM Director Raphael Gross emphasized at the opening: "The violence of German occupation has left deep traces in European countries. Remembering these violent crimes is part of Germany's historical responsibility and a prerequisite for dealing with the present."

The new exhibition in the avant-garde IM Pei Building of the Museum Unter den Linden was curated by Polish art historian Agata Pietrasik, currently working at the Free University of Berlin. On the ground floor of the glass building, designed by the Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, approximately 360 exhibits from France, Great Britain, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany, including 80 original objects, are on display in approximately 400 square meters.

Impressive in the entrance area are the bronze head of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's most important literary figure, and a sculpture of three mourning women, "The Three Marys," created in 1934 by Henryk Kuna. They were part of the exhibition "Warszawa oskarża" (Warsaw Accuses) in the National Museum of the Polish capital, which opened on May 3, 1945, five days before the Wehrmacht generals surrendered in Berlin-Karlshorst. It focused on the destruction of Warsaw following the heroic uprising of Polish patriots against the German occupiers from August 1 to October 2, 1944. The victors' revenge was merciless: bombing, demolitions, arson, and looting. The Germans concentrated primarily on culturally significant institutions, palaces, museums, libraries, and monuments. It's no wonder that the first documentation in the country liberated by the Red Army, together with Polish forces deployed on Soviet territory, was dedicated to this barbarism. In the catalog of the DHM exhibition, Piotr Slodkowski, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, points out the purpose of the show, designed by renowned architects in the equally devastated National Museum: to articulate the "heroic survival of art" as both the "beginning of a new era" and "hope for a better future."

The Polish nation was addressed as homogenous, and the murder of three million Polish Jews was not addressed. "In retrospect, this seems very strange, because unlike in Western Europe, knowledge of the extermination of the Jews was widespread in Poland after the war," writes Slodkowski. "It was reported in the mainstream press, and the decimated Jewish community was strongly committed from the outset to publicizing and commemorating the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ." This initial omission was remedied by a second exhibition three years later, Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and entitled “Martirologye un kamf/ Martyrologia i walka” (Martyrdom and Struggle).

However, the British were the first to initiate the museum-based exposure of German-fascist occupation terror. Thanks to the failed Operation "Sea Lion," they were spared from it, but not from the devastating V1 and V2 rocket attacks. Starting on May 1, 1945, "The Horror Camps" (The Camps of Horror) in the reading room of the "Daily Express" on London's Regent Street showed graphic images from concentration camps recently liberated by the Western Allies. These images were later used as evidence in European courtrooms, including at the Nuremberg Tribunal of the victorious powers of the still-united anti-Hitler coalition against the major Nazi war criminals in 1945/46. "Seeing is Believing" was inscribed on one wall. The images showed the mountains of corpses in the concentration camps and the surviving prisoners, reduced to skeletons. The London Evening Standard reported on the queues of visitors outside the exhibition building under the headline "Remember Belsen and Buchenwald." In an interview, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell emphasized that it was "necessary to both understand and condemn," only then could "the inevitable feeling of revulsion help prevent future atrocities." Even in London at that time, the Jewish identity of many victims was not yet being overtly addressed.

The exhibition "Crimes hitlériens" (Hitler's Crimes), which opened 80 years ago today, on June 10, 1945, at the Grand Palais in Paris, featured urns containing the ashes of people murdered in extermination camps. And, of course, evidence of the German massacre a year earlier in Oradour: a bullet-riddled stroller, as well as personal belongings of the victims, pocket watches, razors, and toys. A trial against the murderers took place in Bordeaux in 1953. The Federal Republic of Germany did not prosecute any of the perpetrators and rejected France's extradition requests. In the mid-1970s, the Stasi tracked down SS Obersturmbannführer Heinz Barth in the GDR, who had been sentenced to death in absentia at the Bordeaux Trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the GDR judiciary, but was released from prison in reunified Germany and even received a war victim's pension until it had to be withdrawn due to public protests. Barth is also said to have been involved in the massacre in Ležáky, Czech Republic, which took place a few days after the annihilation of Lidice, on June 24, 1942, and was also declared an "act of reprisal."

Why are the early exhibitions about Nazi terror in the Soviet Union not mentioned? Bowing to the sanctions against Russia?

Interesting, however, are the comments in the catalogue by Jean-Marc Dreyfus of the Centre d'histoire des Sciences in Paris and history professor at the University of Manchester. He draws attention to the Hotel Lutetia in the French capital, which in 1945 served as a reception center for deportees, survivors of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, Jews, and Resistance fighters. And, it should be added, which, ten years earlier, was the founding site of the Lutetita Circle, the committee for the preparation of a German Popular Front, headed by Heinrich Mann and Willi Münzenberg. Dreyfus recalls a legislative proposal introduced in May 1947 by the French Communist Party faction in the National Assembly to grant special status to deportees, regardless of their origin or political persuasion. The proposal was hotly debated. In August 1947, Parliament passed a law guaranteeing higher pensions to Resistance fighters than to Jewish victims. It was only in the 1970s that the two groups became more equal.

The first Czech post-war exhibition, opened on September 8, 1946, in Liberec, in the "Henlein Villa," the former residence of the Sudeten German Nazi leader Konrad Henlein, primarily featured objects from Lidice, but also from the Gestapo prisons in the Small Fortress of Terezín and the Prague district of Pankrác: knocked-out teeth of tortured resistance fighters, as well as gallows and guillotines. According to Peter Hallama, a professor at the Université Sorbonne in Paris, however, this exhibition reduced the Second World War to a German-Czech conflict and served to justify the expulsion of the German minority from Czechoslovakia after its liberation from fascism. The DHM exhibition features the Czechoslovak coat of arms that was on display there at the time, which was intended to affirm the unity of the Czechs and Slovaks under the motto "Pravda vitezi" (Truth prevails). In 1964, the museum in the "Henlein Villa" was closed, and Theresienstadt, Terezín, became the central place of remembrance, although here, too, "a nationalistic and heroic view of history" was initially conveyed and the supposedly "passive" Jewish victims were excluded.

The sixth of the early post-war exhibitions documented at the German Historical Museum (DHM) is dedicated to the exhibition conceived by Jewish survivors on July 20, 1947, in the former Wehrmacht barracks of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was marked by a new Jewish self-confidence and offered a retrospective on diverse Jewish history, as Katja Seybold, employee of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial, explains, but also on the early marginalization of the Jewish population in Germany. At the same time, it campaigned for immigration to Palestine and the recognition of the Jews as a separate nation, explicitly in a resolution of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the British Occupation Zone under the chairmanship of Josef Rosensaft: "We demand that the United Nations open the gates to the world... We demand of England as the mandatory power: Open the gates of Palestine and finally create the possibility of leaving this blood-stained soil of Germany in order to be able to use our strength, our energy and our will to build our own national home in EREZ ISRAEL." Among the objects shown here is a twelve-part woodcut cycle by Walter Preisser, Holocaust survivor.

The curator of the DHM special exhibition, Agata Pietrasik, concluded: All these early post-war exhibitions revealed "a palpable desire to reclaim the space defiled by the perpetrators by condemning their deeds through the symbolic act of naming the crimes and regaining interpretive authority." At the same time, they demonstrated "that justice could be served not only in the courtroom." Furthermore, the symbols and metaphors that emerged at that time continue to dominate our narratives as "places of memory."

The question remains why the German Historical Museum (DHM) has not organized a post-war exhibition on the Soviet Union. There were far more German massacres there than in Western and Central Europe, from the shooting of over 33,000 Jewish men, women, children, and infants in the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941, to the starvation of millions of citizens of Leningrad during the 900-day blockade of the city on the Neva by the German fascist Wehrmacht. Why are these massacres being ignored today, here in the heart of the German capital, the former den of evil? Voluntary or involuntary subordination to sanctions imposed against Russia, including in the intellectual and cultural spheres? Such kowtowing would cast doubt on the solidity and veracity of the documentation center "Second World War and German Occupation in Europe," which is being established in Berlin under the auspices of the DHM following a resolution by the Bundestag. Speaking of which: The multi-volume documentary series "Europe under the Swastika," begun by GDR scientists in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s, could be helpful in developing this.

"Exhibiting Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation of Europe 1945-1948 ," German Historical Museum, until November 23; guided tour with Agata Pietrasik on June 11, 6:30 p.m.; for the free event series, which can also be experienced digitally , see "Facing Nazi Crimes: European Perspectives after 1945." The retrospective accompanying the exhibition at the Zeughauskino, " Bezeugen und Erzählen. Frühe Bilder von Liberated Camps," is also available ; catalog (Ch. Links Verlag, 164 pp., paperback, €28).