Munich, Germany---Munich will open a museum on the former site of the Nazi party headquarters Thursday, in a long overdue reckoning with the German city's status as the "home of the movement".
The inauguration coincides with the 70th anniversary of the "liberation" of Munich by US troops at the end of World War II, and of Adolf Hitler's suicide the same day in a Berlin bunker.
Ageing American veterans and Holocaust survivors will join political leaders for a solemn ceremony at the new museum, a modern white cube built among a few surviving neo-classical buildings in what was the Nazis' organisational nerve centre.
Museum director Winfried Nerdinger admitted that it had taken Munich too long to face up to its toxic legacy as the birthplace of Hitler's party, a fact long shrouded in shameful silence.
"Munich had a harder time with this than all the other cities in Germany because it is also more tainted than any other city," said Nerdinger, the son of a local resistance member.
"This is where it all began."
Nerdinger said the key aim of the "Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism" was to address how Munich, which prided itself as a hub of tolerance with its thriving arts scene and sprawling beer gardens, could see its civic spirit so perverted.
The four-floor exhibition offers explanatory texts in English as well German, and period photographs and videos documenting jackboot marches and the city's utter destruction by Allied bombing.
A chilling video graphic portrays the city's Jewish community as points of light, with more and more extinguished as the deportations to the concentration camps gathered pace.
Nerdinger noted that he intentionally avoided displays full of crisp brown uniforms or giant swastika flags, saying he had no desire to showcase the Nazi "aesthetic".
Instead, visitors find artifacts such as hand-scrawled sonnets found in the pocket of resistance member Albrecht Haushofer, who was executed just before the war's end. Blood still stains the paper.
AFP
