Source
Source: Das Ende vom Mythos der „sauberen Wehrmacht“ - Hannes Heer
über die erste Wehrmachtsausstellung. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Saar,
December 26,
2015.
https://youtu.be/lwGGETsKbU8?si=06ePaI-S13niyDZR
In 1995, the traveling exhibition “Vernichtungskrieg. Crimes of the
Wehrmacht from 1941-1944”, organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research, opened in Hamburg in 1995. Between April 1995 and October
1997, the exhibition was shown in 33 German and Austrian cities and
aroused great interest among both the public and the media, but this
soon turned into polemics and polarization. There were fierce protests
against the exhibition, particularly in Munich, and in 1999 a bomb
attack was carried out against the exhibition in Saarbrücken. The
central aim of the exhibition was to expose the common narrative of the
“clean Wehrmacht” as untrue and instead to document the extent to which
Wehrmacht soldiers were involved in the murder of the Russian civilian
population and Soviet prisoners of war. Historical photos in particular
served as evidence. It soon became clear that even in the late 1990s,
there was still no social consensus on how extensively the Nazi past
should be dealt with. The debate became more complicated after
historians proved that some of the photos had been misattributed or
mislabeled. In 2001, the newly revised exhibition entitled “Crimes of
the Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941-1944” opened
in Berlin in 2001. It was subsequently shown in various cities in
Germany, Austria and Luxembourg and is now part of the collection of the
German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin.
In this retrospective
account from 2015, historian Hannes Heer, who was responsible for the
first exhibition, describes the reactions to the exhibition.
Source: Das Ende vom Mythos der „sauberen Wehrmacht“ - Hannes Heer
über die erste Wehrmachtsausstellung. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Saar,
December 26,
2015.
https://youtu.be/lwGGETsKbU8?si=06ePaI-S13niyDZR
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941 – 1944. Ausstellungskatalog, Hamburg 2002.
Deutscher Bundestag, Stenographischer Bericht, 163. Sitzung (Wehrmachtsausstellung), Bonn, Donnerstag, den 13. März 1997.