Wehrmacht exhibition forced to close

Major Revisionist Victory

Where Germany’s own historians -- the "Liars and Cowards" -- failed to protest, the foreigners (one Pole, one Hungarian historian) won through. Exhibitor admits: photos were faked

Wehrmacht exhibition closed after protests

By Andrew Gimson in Berlin

A CONTROVERSIAL exhibition about crimes committed by the German army during the Second World War will be closed for at least three months following accusations that it falsifies the record, the organisers said yesterday.

Independent historians have demonstrated that some of the photographs in the exhibition are falsely labelled, with murders committed by Soviet forces sometimes attributed to the Germans.

Hannes Heer, the Hamburg historian who compiled the exhibition, denied that the thesis it advances -- namely that the Wehrmacht, or German Army, was a "criminal organisation" that murdered millions of prisoners and civilians -- was in any way undermined by the misattribution of a few photographs out of the 801 shown.

But opponents of the exhibition, who regard its use of "a flood of gruesome pictures" as a disgraceful way of conveying the false impression that all members of the Wehrmacht were criminals, believe it has now been utterly discredited.

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the founder and head of the Hamburg research institute which produced the exhibition, said a committee of independent experts will now check the provenance of the pictures.

The exhibition provoked riots and demonstrations in many of the 32 German and Austrian cities where it has so far been shown. Opponents were incensed at the full-scale attack it launches on the convenient idea, believed in by many Germans, that the Wehrmacht fought an honourable war while the SS was responsible for war crimes and the Holocaust.

Related stories:

• Historian Peter Witte ("Himmler Diaries") reports this triumph to the Internet
• Related stories and links

Our opinion

  THE description of the inclusion of eighty percent-faked photographs as "some" and "a few" is characteristic of the brainless waffle that has surrounded the whole debate on the Holocaust since the 1970s. None of the newspapers has commented on the fact that not one of Germany's own cowardly historians had dared go into print with an exposure of the forgeries, for fear of being prosecuted under Germany's laws for the suppression of free speech. It took a Pole and a Hungarian to do the job.