Immediately after the Second World War, how did six exhibitions attempt to make sense of the atrocities?
When does the past end and the present begin? That is the difficult question posed this month at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, in an exhibition that revisits how Europeans in the period immediately following the Second World War tried to make sense of the catastrophe in a number of remarkable, ambitious and often wildly popular museum shows.
On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-48 recalls six shows that took place in sites as diverse as the Grand Palais in Paris and a stately Czech villa that had just served as the wartime home of a Nazi official. The post-war exhibitions used a range of objects and devices to commemorate the dead or document crimes. The new Berlin show uses film footage, photographs, recordings and often many of the original objects to give visitors in 2025 a sense of what it might have been like to see these exhibitions at a time when Europe was still counting its dead.
Days before the European war officially ended on 8 May 1945, the UK’s Daily Express newspaper mounted a show in its London reading room called The Horror Camps, in which documentary photographs of newly liberated concentration camps were blown up into overwhelming murals. On Displaying Violence recalls that show with photographs of the visitors, aghast at what they were seeing. The German Jewish Expressionist artist Ludwig Meidner, who was in exile in London, attended the Daily Express show and in response created a charcoal drawing called Trek of People, which will be on view in Berlin.
In June 1945, a French travelling exhibition called Hitlerian Crimes opened at the Grand Palais and was eventually seen by around one million people, says Agata Pietrasik, the curator of On Displaying Violence. A key aspect of the show, she says, was the documentation of the notorious massacre of French civilians the year before in Oradour-sur-Glane, south-western France. The Waffen-SS burned alive nearly 650 men, women and children as an act of retribution for French Resistance activity in the area. The Grand Palais displayed objects found on the site of the massacre. A charred iridescent pocket watch that was later part of the travelling version of the show will be on view in Berlin.
Eerie assemblages
Warsaw Accuses was held in 1945 in the remnants of the Polish capital’s pre-war National Museum. The Modernist building, though damaged, had survived the levelling of the city due to its use by the Nazis as a depot for the siphoning off of art deemed suitable for looting, or else set for destruction. The exhibition, designed by architects who went on to plan the rebuilding of Warsaw, had a “semi-Surrealist” quality, Pietrasik says. Documentation of the displays, going on view in Berlin, shows eerie assemblages of empty picture frames and fragments of doomed works. Shortly before the Warsaw show opened, the severed bronze head of the national poet Adam Mickiewicz, part of a destroyed public monument by the Polish sculptor Cyprian Godebski, was discovered near a ruined factory and put on view. It, too, will make its way to Berlin.
One of the largest of these exhibitions was held in 1947 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, recast after the war as a displaced persons camp. A transit point for Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the camp quickly but briefly became a site of Jewish revival and remembrance. Our Path to Freedom, with labels in Yiddish, included a series of 12 woodcut prints by the German Jewish artist Walter Preisser, who depicted his wartime suffering in various camps. All 12 prints will be shown in Berlin.
Design often had urgent uses in these exhibitions, Pietrasik says, citing the poster advertising the 1946 Czech show Memorial to Nazi Barbarism, mounted in a Jewish-owned villa seized by the Nazis. Combining several different typefaces on a brown background, and crisscrossed with depictions of barbed wire, the poster contains an immense swastika—something that museums would never use now to advertise a show, adds the curator.
The wider purpose of these exhibitions was one of distancing, Pietrasik says, citing the Czech poster’s repurposing of what had just been a symbol of power into a symbol of criminality. “The exhibitions were a device,” she says. They could demonstrate, to their immediate post-war audiences that “this is now the past—and now we’re in the present”.
• On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-48, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 24 May-23 November
