Berlin exhibition shows how Europe reckoned with Nazi crimes after World War II

How could the terrible crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II be brought to the attention of the public? Despite limited resources, exhibitions were organized throughout Europe immediately after the end of the war to document, denounce, and remember what had happened. The German Historical Museum (DHM), in the center of Berlin, is now showcasing six of those exhibitions, which took place between 1945 and 1948, in the show On Displaying Violence.

Many people simply wanted to quickly forget the horrors they had experienced, but confronting the crimes of the Nazi occupation, persecution, and, above all, the Holocaust was important in putting the past behind them. Hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern and Western Europe visited these exhibitions. It became a way of overcoming trauma. However, many of them ignored or barely addressed the fact that the victims were primarily Jewish. The British wanted to show what the Nazis were capable of; the Germans and French focused more on patriotic and Christian narratives of victimhood and the rebirth of national pride, as the Berlin museum explains.

The six exhibitions on display in Berlin aim to provide insight into the different perspectives and narratives that emerged. “I hope visitors understand that, in the period immediately following World War II, this experience of violence wasn’t just something they experienced, but something people were overcoming, and that these exhibitions were very important in processing everything that happened,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Agata Pietrasik. “It was a kind of collective conversation that took place across Europe through various exhibitions and projects.”

Each exhibition had its own narrative, “very much connected to the history of the occupation in each country,” the expert notes. “For example, in Warsaw, the exhibitions were organized in a city that was almost completely destroyed, so this theme of ruin and destruction is very present.”

Pietrasik acknowledges that it’s difficult to know exactly how many exhibitions were organized in this period. For the curator, it was important not only to include the most successful ones, but also to showcase different approaches to what had happened and ensure there was sufficient material. Each of the six exhibitions includes historical recordings and, of course, photographs — images in which the horror is reflected on the faces of the visitors of that time.

“We are showing how images of Nazi crimes were first shown, images that continue to influence collective memory to this day,” said Raphael Gross, president of the German Historical Museum Foundation, during the press conference to launch the exhibition, which will be on view until November 23. “Each one was an attempt to understand what had happened. On the one hand, they were shaped by rapidly developing national perspectives. And on the other, they also reflected an increasingly strong transnational European understanding.”

The exhibition begins with The Horror Camps, which opened on May 1, 1945, just days before the end of the war. The British tabloid Daily Express hung photographs in its London reading room that were too shocking to be published. Some showed piles of corpses in German concentration camps. It opened two weeks after British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

Nearly 700,000 people visited it during its eight-month run. The enormous photographs of the newly liberated concentration camps became an overwhelming testimony — and remain iconic representations of the Holocaust to this day.

Another exhibition that drew large crowds was Crimes Hitlériens, which opened in June 1945 at the Grand Palais in Paris. There, the vast geographical reach of the Nazi occupation was made visible with a monumental map. The exhibition toured various parts of France and Europe and was seen by more than a million people in total.

Next, at the center of the DHM exhibition hall, two Warsaw-based exhibitions are placed in contrast. The first, titled Warszawa oskarża (Warsaw Accuses), opened in May 1945 at the National Museum — severely damaged by the war — and was visited by more than 400,000 people. Rubble was cleared to fill the building with cultural artifacts destroyed during the conflict, with shattered paintings and fragments of statues serving as metaphors for devastation and violence. However, despite the fact that over three million Jews were murdered in Poland, they were barely mentioned in the Warsaw exhibition.

Three years later, in April 1948, on the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a small exhibition titled Martyrologia i walka (Martyrdom and Struggle) focused — unlike the others — on Jewish suffering. Among the items on display is a kilim, a woven tapestry made in 1942 in the Łódź Ghetto by Jewish forced laborers. It depicts four people sorting through scraps of fabric and was made from remnants of clothing from extermination camps.

Continuing through the exhibition, visitors enter the display organized in 1946 in Liberec, in what is now the Czech Republic. There, a former house confiscated by a Nazi official from a Jewish couple who had fled was transformed into a memorial monument titled Památník nacistického barbarství (Memorial of Nazi Barbarity). The focus was on the atrocities committed by the occupiers, with exhibits including replicas of the guillotine and the gallows from the Gestapo prison in Prague. However, the suffering of the Jewish and Romani populations was ignored, even though they comprised approximately 75% of Czech victims.

The last of the six exhibitions took place in 1947 at the displaced persons camp on the grounds of Bergen-Belsen, under the title Undzer veg in der frayheyt (Our Path to Freedom). After liberation, many survivors — mostly Jews from Eastern Europe — could neither return to nor wanted to go back to their home countries. Over 11,000 people lived as displaced persons in a former Nazi army barracks, preparing to emigrate to Palestine. To counterbalance the traces of destruction, the exhibition showcased objects of hope: images of renewed community life and products from Jewish sewing and metalworking classes.

In the end, as the curator explains, each exhibition had “a political objective, and each one was held in a country with a different political situation.” “It was very much about reconstruction, so in a way, these exhibitions also show that, for a country to move forward and rebuild, it’s important to have a narrative about what happened,” adds Pietrasik. “They allowed people to move forward and move from destruction to rebuilding. That’s why I think these exhibitions focus so much on identity, national communities, and so on, because they responded to these kinds of political demands.”

Analyzing how Europe dealt with the crimes committed during World War II is “very difficult,” but also “very important,” says Pietrasik. “In some ways, that past is still relevant to us. It continues to shape our present in many ways.”

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