Front pages of the German magazine, Der Spiegel, displaying portraits of Nazi criminals and Adolf Hitler at a preview of Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime

No one could accuse the Germans of failing to face up to their past. In the 65 years since the end of World War II, Germany has hosted a multitude of exhibitions on the Third Reich and the heinous crimes of the Nazis. Yet, until now, there has been a major omission in Germany’s historical canon: an exhibition that deals specifically with the man who climbed to the top of German politics, initiated a world war, and committed perhaps the worst collection of crimes in history. This void, however, has now been filled by the German Historical Museum’s ground-breaking exhibition, Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime, which opened in Berlin recently.

The exhibition, as the title implies, is not a biography. Aside from being impossibly controversial, a biographical study of Hitler would, in actual fact, be relatively prosaic. There will always be psychopaths in the world and the only thing that we can hope is that they are never in a position to affect peoples’ lives. But what if they are? What if they do manage to gain a position of power? Then the important question, historically, is not to do with the individual but with the multitude of individuals who collectively placed him/her in this position. The question with regard to Hitler, therefore, is not why was he such an evil man (as psychologically interesting as this may be) but how did he gain and sustain power in Germany? How did he become chancellor in 1933 — not on the back of a revolutionary putsch, but through votes cast in the ballot box? How did he create a party that commanded vast popularity in Germany? And how did he lead a nation into crime? These are the questions at the heart of Hitler and the Germans.

Hitler, as one would expect, is still a hugely sensitive subject in Germany. When, in 1999, the Führerbunker (thought to have been largely destroyed by the Russians in 1949) was unearthed by construction workers in former East Berlin, it was decided that it would be covered back up rather than excavate and risk creating a neo-Nazi shrine. For the same reason, the exhibition deliberately omits featuring ‘relics’ that Hitler might have touched. Rather, the objects on display — Nazi lampshades, Swastika Christmas decorations, various uniforms and letters written to Hitler by adoring children — are there to remind us of the nation’s collaboration with Hitler and with Nazism. Where he is depicted, Hitler is presented either as the embodiment of evil or a ludicrous upstart — Charlie Chaplin’s film, The Great Dictator, juxtaposed with actual newsreel of Hitler greeting Mussolini in 1937, and Marinus Jacob Kjeldgaard’s haunting montage, Hitler as a Skull, are particularly evocative. There is also a telling silence as one wanders around; documentaries on the Nazis have freely incorporated newsreel from Hitler’s speeches, yet that demonic voice has been excluded from the museum to avoid any possibility of visitors identifying with it.

The effect of all this precaution is an unusually wordy tour through the 1930s and 1940s. Photographs of leading Nazis, busts and propaganda posters are accompanied by lengthy chunks of text. Yet, while it may be voluminous, and incongruously static, considering the Nazi talent for public display, this approach manages to avoid any of the controversies that some predicted. On the contrary, in talking to the visitors who have so far been attending the exhibition at a rate of 2,500 people a day, I am struck by their calm contemplation. No one I talk to thinks an exhibition on Hitler inappropriate or surprising. When I ask a 16-year-old girl what she thinks of an exhibition focused specifically on Hitler, she replies that it is entirely natural and important: “He was, after all, the head”.

Talking to an older man with a long handlebar moustache, I ask what he feels about the full title of the exhibition: Hitler and the Germans. Did he agree that it was the nation, the Volksgemeinschaft, as much as the man at the centre, which was responsible for what happened? He pauses before taking me on a historical journey from his childhood, in the immediate aftermath of the Allied victory, to the present. In the initial decades after the war, he explains, there was a tendency in Germany to simply “blame him”. This, as Simone Erpel, one of the museum’s curators, later adds, was hardly surprising. The major issue with the war for the generation that lived through it and were involved in it was that any degree of explanation invariably involved an element of self-justification. The ‘we didn’t know what was happening’ and the ‘we were conned’ schools of thought were natural reactions to losing the war and the revelations about the Third Reich that followed. There was, however, during the late 1960s and 1970s, a backlash from a younger generation determined to get to the truth. The “moral outrage” of a new generation blessed with what the former West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, called the “the blessing of late birth”, prompted a wave of investigations into Germany’s past, with many younger Germans asking their parents and grandparents what they did and what they knew. The result, reflected in this exhibition, was the seminal conclusion that the “one man acting alone theory” simply didn’t wash and that “the whole nation was culpable”.

This conclusion, now ubiquitous, amounts to a historical hair-shirt that Germany wears with sombre dignity. Everyone that I met spoke of their responsibility to remember and investigate the causes of a regime that brought unparalleled misery to the world. There is no guilt. The vast majority of people that I come across have no more reason to feel guilty for the rise of Hitler than I do, but there is responsibility. Pondering this before my interview with Erpel, it strikes me how much further historical responsibility has been taken in Germany than just about any other country in the world. Marcel Ophüls’ revolutionary two-part documentary, Le chagrin et le pitié, (finally shown in 1981 after a 12-year prohibition was lifted), went a long way towards correcting the Gaullist myth in France, but a Paris exhibition on Vichy is still a long way off, just as an exhibition on Stalin’s crimes in Moscow remains unthinkable. When I put this to Erpel, she is appropriately tactful and avoids comparisons with other countries. Germany, she concedes, holds itself to a high standard, but that is natural given “the dimension of the crimes”.

It is also natural to reflect when the consequences of the past are so clearly visible today. Berlin is a new-old city. It is a historic city that has had much of its historic legacy destroyed by war and then by partition. In this “landscape of memory”, as Erpel poetically calls it, it is impossible but to reflect — to reflect and to question. “We have to understand,” as one man puts it to me, “how this could have happened”.

So how did it happen? It happened for relatively simple reasons that in no way inevitably led to the horrendous actions that followed. The collapse of the German economy, after the triple effect of post-war reparations, hyper-inflation and finally the Great Depression, confirmed to many the failures of social democracy, while leaving the vast majority of the population hungry and desperate. Hitler and the Nazis offered an alternative.

When, having breakfast with an aspiring novelist, I mention another precondition of the Nazi rise — the Treaty of Versailles — I am taken aback by her reaction. “I don’t understand this,” she says. “I just don’t.” “Why couldn’t they have just risen above it?” This is, however, to confuse consequences with causes. The Treaty of Versailles, with its humiliating “war guilt clause”, was both punitive and a raw source of grievance to the German people. It does not count as an excuse for what later happened under the Nazis, but it does go a long way to explaining the longing for change in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.

Great events do not have to have great causes and they rarely have just one. But as long as museums continue to put on exhibitions such as Hitler and the Germans, we can at least hope that the destructive events that followed these causes will never happen again.