Chloe Paver writes:
The English-language website for the museum can seem a bit obscure without a PhD in German memory debates, but has some interesting things to say.
Amongst other things it mentions the ‘war of annihilation’, a literal translation of the German ‘Vernichtungskrieg’. This term expresses the idea, now widespread among historians, that the war fought on Germany’s eastern front was fundamentally different from a normal territorial war.
Though German historians certainly don’t speak with one voice – any more than in the UK – there is a fairly strong consensus that the war in the East was not a traditional war of attack and defence. The Nazi regime conceived of it as a war for racial and ideological supremacy against Jews, ‘Slavs’ and communists. With the agreement of military high command they set aside the international conventions on war, giving themselves license to commit summary execution, massacres, and genocide, and to exploit agricultural resources for the ‘homeland’ at the expense of local populations. There is some wrangling over the detail, but the new breed of German war museums (including the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden) put these ideas at the heart of their display narratives: the Holocaust and the mistreatment of occupied civilians and POWs were not processes incidental to the war, they were fundamental to military strategy and tactics.
This self-critical view of history must make it easier for German historians and curators to work with their Russian counterparts, but what if Russia is rather less willing to admit to failings on its side? While we can’t know how these negotiations played out, the displays in the museum seem to suggest that the willingness to confess to crimes and misdemeanours was stronger on the German side. There is a hint of this in the two displays on POWs: Soviet POWs in German captivity and German POWs in Soviet captivity. The former starts with an eye-catching, full-height display dominated by a statistic in very large lettering: ‘60% died’. This is the figure for Soviet deaths in German captivity and indicates the level of criminal behaviour, ranging from negligence to sustained neglect to murder, in German-run POW camps. Clearly no amount of ‘accidents of war’ can produce a 60% death rate (the equivalent figure for British and US soldiers held by the Germans was evidently less than 4%).
The corresponding display board for German prisoners of war in Soviet camps is much less eye-catching, partly due to its position in a corridor. The formulation of the board seems to have been difficult, since one sentence does not follow very logically from another. Almost the first thing the board states is that the Soviets abided by the relevant international conventions. It is only later that the board gives the number of German dead, and this time not as a percentage, though one can work it out with a calculator as 15%. Not a headline-grabbing figure, but one that might need more explanation than is offered. The widespread rape of German women at the end of the war is also not directly addressed in the exhibition.
I am not suggesting that German historians may have given way to pressure from Russian historians in a way that undermines the museum; it has a very sound academic grounding. Nevertheless staging bi-laterally agreed memories is a challenging enterprise. And a museum website, with its necessarily upbeat rhetoric, is not the place to express any differences of opinion.
Reading the website, it can sometimes seem like the museum has forgotten that its target audience are normal tourists who want to know what there is worth seeing before they get on the S-Bahn to Karlshorst. Perhaps this is because this kind of museum is driven by political and social motives rather than by commercial imperatives. The will to educate people about the crimes and the past and to show Germany’s readiness to face up to that past are considered a self-sufficient justification for museums dealing with National Socialism, which rarely try to sell themselves to a diverse public.
German History Museums 