MUNICH: Munich opened a museum on Thursday on the former site of the Nazi party headquarters, in a long-delayed reckoning with the German city’s status as the “home of the movement”.

The inauguration coincided 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 joined political leaders for a solemn ceremony for 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. “Mayor Dieter Reiter insisted Munich was ready to “face up to its Nazi past”.

As about 30 neo-Nazi demonstrators gathered outside behind security barriers and a larger group of counter-protesters, Reiter said those who questioned German democracy showed why such a museum was needed “here and today”. The “Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism” examines how Munich, which prided itself on its culture of tolerance, thriving arts scene and convivial beer gardens, could become the cradle of fascism.

The four-floor exhibition offers explanatory texts in English and German, and period photographs and videos documenting jackboot marches and the city’s utter destruction by Allied bombing.

Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2015

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