Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Ideology
A new museum exhibit in Berlin focuses on the mass appeal of a failed artist who
spent time in a homeless shelter and went on to become one of history's biggest
mass murderers.
The exhibit, "Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime," is drawing huge crowds at
the German Historical Museum.
The show explores how ordinary Germans not only accepted but often also
celebrated and idolized the Fuhrer. It also shows how the Nazi's racist ideology
seeped deeply into popular culture and everyday life with playing cards with Hitler
on them, Nazi board games, Third Reich quilts and swastika party lanterns all on
display.
"I think it's really important to show it again and again and again over the next
decades," says 38-year-old Markus Hoppe, who came from Hamburg, Germany, to
see the exhibit. "There were so many who were involved [in Nazi crimes]. ... The
media and people they were involved."
Historical Propaganda
It is not the first time a German museum has exposed the depth of the Fuhrer cult.
But it is a first for the German Historical Museum the country's national museum.
"Not only one man, not only the SS, not only some perpetrators, but the whole
society [took] part to stabilize this regime and make it possible."
- Simone Erpel, one of the curators of "Hitler and the Germans"
The cultural artifacts are striking. There is a large stand-up ad for drummer
cigarettes with a smiling brown-shirted Nazi SA member. Hitler is a drummer for big
ideas, the saying went, smoke national socialist cigarettes.
There are metal signs that were posted in public parks and at entrances to towns:
"No Jews wanted," they exclaim.
The Luftwaffe- and Wehrmacht-themed board games, which suggest family fun
playing blitzkrieg around the kitchen table, caught the eye of Hoppe.
"I was really impressed in a negative way by those sick games they played during
the war, like war games," he says. "I can't believe this. I haven't known this before."
It wasn't just board games that targeted children. There are hand puppets for kids
from the early 1930s with grotesque caricatures of Jews and other groups the Nazis
would later murder en masse at death camps and elsewhere.
There are carefully colored toy figures made of plastic, a new material at the time,
so kids could play with goose-stepping Wehrmacht soldiers.
And they could create their own Nazi rally with a toy Hitler giving his stiff-armed
salute from a podium surrounded by swastikas and Gen. Hermann Goering, the Nazi
military and party official who committed suicide after he was sentenced to death
for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.
A Broad Regime
Historian Simone Erpel, one of the curators of "Hitler and the Germans," says the
exhibit is important to underscore again that the crimes of the Nazis were not
committed by only a few.
"Not only one man, not only the SS, not only some perpetrators, but the whole
society [took] part to stabilize this regime and make it possible," she says.
Erpel stands before a large needle and patchwork tapestry, which was created by
village women from a Protestant Church in central Germany.
The tapestry, which was started in 1933 just after Hitler took power, shows boys
and girls in Nazi garb. The church congregation and the army are all marching
toward the church, surrounded by the words to the Lord's Prayer. A swastika flies
from the church steeple above the cross. The tapestry's meaning is clear: Party,
church and state are one.
"The motive is, 'We bring the swastika into the church,'" Erpel says and notes that
the congregation was ordinary and adapted quickly and eagerly to the Nazi
ideology.
"There was not a political reason to do it," she says. "They do it for themselves."
Erpel also says the show comes at an opportune time given the increasingly shrill
tone of anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany.
A Notable Absence
But the idea of a larger circle of guilt has been explored before, and some German
critics complain the exhibit fails to break new ground.
When you see all these pictures here today maybe you cannot fully understand it.
But at least you come one step closer, she says.
The exhibit "Hitler and the Germans" runs through early February.