Germans nervously put Adolf Hitler on display

An extremely nervous Germany is staging the first exhibition dedi- cated to the Nazi leader since the Fuhrer killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945.
Hitler and the Germans, which opens today, shatters a taboo. Scores of museum displays have been organised on the Holocaust, on slave labour, on the murdering doctors, cruel judges and massa- cring soldiers, and all have trig- gered debates and protests.
Hitler himself, however, has always been out of bounds - and in Berlin most of all, lest neo-Nazis swarm to the museum to pay tribute to the dictator of the Third Reich. The sensitivity was shown two years ago when a wax model was put on display in the Berlin Madame Tus- sauds - prompting an enraged vis- itor to push past security guards and rip off the Fuhrer’s head.
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“Neo-Nazis have not been known to cross the threshold of muse- ums in the past,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, curator of the Hitler show in the German Historical Museum. The museum is part of the old Zeughaus, or arsenal, the scene of a failed attempt to blow up Hitler. Across the road is the Bebelplatz where Nazis made a bonfire of “decadent” books. A 10-minute walk away is the patch of green concealing Hitler’s wartime bun- ker - for decades unmarked, now acknowledged with an information board.
When the exhibition was first mooted in 2004, historians imme- diately rejected the idea of calling it simply Hitler, as too shocking for the Germans. The theme has been broadened: how did Hitler interact with the Germans?
None of Hitler’s many tunics is on display and anything that could have been touched by the Fuhrer has been banished from the mu- seum. Nor are there any bone fragments. “Don’t worry,” said one historian after a sneak preview, “they have made sure that you won’t come into contact with any of Hitler’s DNA”.
A Berlin exhibition 16 years ago of the photographs by Hitler’s court pho- tographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, had to be called off in case it stirred Nazi sympathies. The Hitler salute remains banned, as is the swastika.

From this week, though, it seems to be all right to take the kids to see the Fuhrer.
Significantly, the posters advertising the exhibition do not display his face - as if looking into his eyes could induce, again, a kind of mass hypnosis.