A World War II exhibit that unmasks the regular German army as Holocaust executioners, not just dutiful soldiers, is raising a furor in Bavaria, birthplace of Hitler's Nazi movement.
Older Germans tend to view Hitler's regular armed forces - called the Wehrmacht - as an army that properly fulfilled its duties by battling enemy soldiers, while Nazi SS units carried out the Fuehrer's plan to rid Europe of Jews.That view is graphically rejected by an exhibit called "Extermination War: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44." It documents killings of Jews, Gypsies and prisoners of war in the Soviet Union and the Balkans.
After traveling to 16 cities in Germany and Austria during the past two years, the exhibit opens Monday in Munich, the capital of Germany's most conservative state, Bavaria.
Featured are photographs of civilians being shot and hanged, Nazi military papers, and letters and diaries written by ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers recounting mass killings.
The exhibit's curator, Hannes Heer, said it is not intended to suggest every Wehrmacht unit was involved in atrocities. Nonetheless, he said, the Wehrmacht did have a considerable role in killing Jews and other civilians in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
The display has caused a stir wherever it has gone, but nothing like the commotion in Bavaria. Neo-Nazis from across Germany plan to march in Munich on Saturday to protest the display.
"Our grandfathers were not criminals, and we are proud of them," the protest's extremist organizers said in an announcement on the Internet.
Mindful of war veterans among voters, Bavaria's conservative governing party has criticized the exhibit, and, in turn, has drawn fire from leftists.
The uproar has given a black eye to Bavaria, a region of lederhosen and Alpine vistas that would sooner forget that Hitler launched his Nazi Party there in the 1920s.
The Wehrmacht exhibit was put together by German historians under the sponsorship of tobacco heir-turned-philanthropist Jan Phillip Reemtsma and will be shown at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University.
Historians have written before about atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht. But never have so many documents and photographs been gathered together to show the full scope of the army's involvement in civilian massacres.
"The Wehrmacht conducted no `normal war' in the Balkans and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944," states a catalog showing material from the exhibit.
Heer, the curator, told Der Spiegel magazine "the Wehrmacht was responsible for the death of up to 1.5 million Jews, 3.3 million prisoners of war and 5 million to 7 million (non-Jewish) civilians who all died as non-combatants."
Ruthless SS commando units called "Einsatz Gruppen" conducted horrific killing campaigns against Jews in the Soviet Union. But soldiers in the Wehrmacht's 6th Army also participated, the documents show.
A 6th Army soldier identified only as Franz proudly wrote to his parents on July 7, 1941: "So far we have sent about 1,000 Jews to the hereafter. But that's still too few."
Another soldier wrote that his unit was ordered to execute 1,000 Jews in a single day.
Some soldiers showed up at the execution of Jews with their cameras, so they would have keepsakes to show relatives. Apparently because the Wehrmacht leadership wanted to conceal its involvement, snapshots were eventually forbidden by a 6th Army document that is also in the exhibit.
In photographs and unit logs, the exhibit shows how the 342nd Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht operating in Serbia executed Jewish civilians in 1941.
The exhibit has been condemned by German war veterans, who say it defames them and their fallen comrades.
In a letter to the German press, one veteran wrote, "German soldiers achieved remarkable things for the Volk (people) and the Fatherland" in the Soviet Union. Another said the documents and photos must be fakes.
Heer said such attitudes showed the need for evidence of the Wehr-macht's crimes to be put on public display.
Immediately after the war, he said, there was a conscious effort in Germany to portray Wehrmacht soldiers as having taken orders from Hitler only because that was their military duty and of having no involvement in atrocities committed by the SS.