Hitler and the Germans: first exposure to a deadly alchemy

Written by Sandeep Nehra

Berlin hosts a museum, from Friday, the first exhibition in Germany that tries to explain how a disoriented people saw Adolf Hitler in his “savior”, the next in the war and destruction.

“It’s a miracle of our time that you’ve found among all those millions (of people)! And I’ve found, is the chance for Germany!” Said Hitler in a speech in Nuremberg in 1936, quoted in the exhibition catalog “Hitler and the Germans.”

65 years after the Second World War, this exhibition which runs until February 6 in the Annex German Historical Museum, built by American architect IM Pei, is studying the mechanisms that have maintained the fascination until blindness of the people for their Fuehrer.

This “need to explain is how insignificant Adolf Hitler, the man who lived 30 years in anonymity, has no education, no political experience has been that savior, “said historian Hans-Ulrich Thamer, curator of the exhibition.

Speaking of Hitler, out of astrictly academic, remains very difficult in Germany. “The German Historical Museum wanted to do this show since 2003 or so,” reveals Mr. Thamer.

A first exhibition project of the personality and career of Hitler had stumbled upon the unanimous opposition of the scientific committee of the Museum, who feared to maintain a kind of morbid fascination for the “evil”.

But three years ago, the museum returned to the charge, instructing the historian working on the very general theme “Hitler and National Socialism.”

“I could arrange (this issue) to my liking. I tried to collect here what is currently the historical research,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer.

“We want to explain the rise, the procedure, the exercise of power until the fall and the incredible potential for destruction released by National Socialism,” he says.

“Not part of the personality of Hitler, which is a sort of evil demon who would corrupt the millions of people” but otherwise presenting “the adhesion mechanisms, mobilization of the masses, but also to exclude that weave the relationship between the Fuehrer and the people, “welded in the Nazi concept of” community of a people “(Volksgemeinschaft), he says.

This project is a homogeneous society, providing security and employment, was addressed to social groups affected by the economic crisis of the late 1920s, and justified the persecution. The most fervent admirers of Hitler “were not really people who have succeeded,” he said.

Thus, “photos show that the persecution of political opponents, Jews, deportation of Jews was passing in the full knowledge of everyone.” “Community of the people” is constituted as much by the exclusion of opponents and enemies than adherence to behavior.

The exhibit face-to-face documents on the Holocaust and the products of Nazi propaganda that seeped into every aspect of life.

We discover a poster that explains how to properly hello Hitler, a card game with effigies of the Nazi leaders, a tapestry that decorated the grounds Nazi church.

A workbook which can be laminated electronically, shows how Hitler changed the curriculum for schools to produce good little Nazi.

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