On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-1948
Opening speech by curator Agata Pietrasik
Agata Pietrasik | 26 May 2025
Since 24 May 2025 the Deutsches Historisches Museum is showing the exhibition “On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-1948” in the Pei Building. Curator Dr Agata Pietrasik gave the following speech at the opening ceremony on 23 May 2025:
The topic of our exhibition is perhaps extraordinary: we are exhibiting other exhibitions. Importantly, these were not regular museum shows but pioneering endeavors organized across Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, conceived of in order to display recently experienced violence and destruction. This phenomenon might be met with surprise because it doesn’t fit what we most readily associate with postwar Europe—a ruined continent still marked by the violence, including anti-Jewish violence, where millions of people were displaced. From our contemporary perspective it is hard to imagine such a situation of scarcity and social and political instability as conducive to exhibition making. Yet the projects we are presenting today in the German Historical Museum are testimony to the fact that addressing that recent violent history was in many ways as essential as material reconstruction.
Exhibitions became a pre-eminent mass medium of the early postwar period because they brought together and engaged in dialogue a broad variety of other mediums: film, photography, artworks and artifacts, together with historical documents such as records. These materials were often taken directly from sites of perpetration and performed the role of mute witnesses, bringing a sense of proximity to violence and suffering at the same time as grounding it in both objecthood and objectivity. Making such exhibitions went hand in hand with establishing the first institutions dedicated to preserving the history and memory of the Second World War and the German Occupation.
Some of the exhibitions we present here today were a runaway success—drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors—while others were made on a far smaller scale but were of no lesser significance in the long term. The goal of these quite diverse projects can be broadly described as the first attempt to articulate the very recent violent and genocidal history. An attempt to present a narrative based on evidence and a chronology that drew a clear line between past and present and gave space to the voices of those who survived and witnessed the atrocities of the time. A narrative with a beginning but also, crucially, an end—one most often imagined in justice being served to the perpetrators and the rebuilding of a new, just social and political life. The exhibitions had the ability to make these aspirations come to life with images and objects, to make them visible and palpable. They could contain and shape public emotion by creating spaces of mourning, and accusation, but also information.
Our exhibition takes a careful and critical look back at this multifaceted phenomenon—not in its totality, but by concentrating on an exemplary selection of pioneering and impactful postwar exhibitions and their social and political context, which often influenced the content of the displays and their modes of presentation. From a multitude of initiatives, we focus on six exhibitions organized in London, Paris, Warsaw, Liberec and in the DP camp in Bergen-Belsen.
All of these were staged between Spring 1945 and 1948, in an interim period before the onset of the Cold War, and at a time when many Holocaust survivors were still in Europe, albeit many awaiting immigration. These exhibitions were dynamic devices and, in many cases, travelled domestically and internationally, including between what would soon become East and West, separated by the Iron Curtain. These events drew enormous audiences in cities and towns throughout Europe: over 400 000 people visited the exhibition Warszawa oskarża at the National Museum in Warsaw, and 487 000 attendees were registered at the exhibition Crimes hitlériens at the Grand Palais in Paris. Organized by different actors ranging from state agencies and war crimes commissions to formal and informal groups of Holocaust survivors, these exhibitions bring together perspectives of both particular individuals and groups, as well as institutions.
The titles of these exhibitions speak for themselves: Horror Camps, Crimes hitlériens [Hitlerian Crimes], Warszawa Oskarża [Warsaw Accuses], Martirologye un kamf/ Martyrologia i walka [Martyrology and Struggle], Památník nacistického barbarství [Memorial to Nazi Barbarism], and Undzer veg in der frayheyt [Our Path to Freedom]. These very strong and evocative words channeled both outrage and accusation. They encapsulated not only the emotions but also the distinctive message of each exhibition. They stood for the distinct ways in which the history of German occupation was faced in each of the occupied countries.
Exhibitions are temporal in nature. They are opened and then closed leaving scattered traces in the archives and museum collections. It was our work to recover these traces and to make these exhibitions possible to re-imagine. Not to reconstruct, or relive them, but to create the possibility for a contemporary audience to envisage their spaces, their designs, be able to engage some of the objects exhibited, and recognize the narrative of each project. To see the people behind them and catch the voice of their historical audience. In each section of our exhibition, we have tried to create a space of careful and critical consideration of the content and to capture the specific context of each show.
Since these historical exhibitions, even if sometimes forgotten, worked beyond their duration—pointing to future ways of remembering and representing—it is important to understand from our contemporary perspective both their potential and their limitations, which often have long-lasting repercussions.
In the post-war social and political situation of the late 1940s, with strong desires to rebuild and consolidate nations, state-sponsored exhibition projects often focused on forging a collective identity based on suffering, while obscuring or minimizing difficult issues such as how the perpetration of violence, especially in the case of the Holocaust, was also enabled from within the formerly occupied societies. The question of what has been done to us has often eclipsed the question of how we have contributed to the suffering of others. These national perspectives obscured the voices of Jewish and Romani minorities who faced mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Survivors of the Holocaust immediately created their own exhibitions to narrate the history of the Holocaust from their perspective, rooted in their own experience, while in the case Romani survivors such exhibitions were initiated only decades after the war.
Therefore, at the core of our project is the recognition of these various voices, along with their inherent differences, and also a recognition of the silences and patterns of silencing, which in many cases have long continued to operate.
These historical endeavors very clearly demonstrate that exhibitions, and by extension museums, are places for presenting and holding conversations about the most difficult and painful pasts. The efforts of those who organized the first postwar exhibitions in the face of unprecedented destruction and in many cases despite personal suffering, should encourage us today to continue to engage in this process.