War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944

The Wehrmachtsausstellung (German: German Wehrmacht Army Exhibition) was a series of two exhibitions focusing on war crimes of the Wehrmacht during World War II. Both exhibitions were produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung); the first under the title "War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" (Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944), which opened in Hamburg on 5 March 1995 and travelled to 33 German and Austrian cities. It was attended by 800,000 visitors claimed the organizers. The second exhibition – which was first shown in Berlin in November 2001 – attempted to dissipate considerable controversy generated by the first exhibition according to the Institute.

The popular and controversial travelling exhibition was seen by an estimated 1.2 million visitors over the last decade. Using written documents from the era and archival photographs, the organizers had shown that the Wehrmacht was "involved in planning and implementing a war of annihilation against Jews, prisoners of war, and the civilian population". Historian Hannes Heer and Gerd Hankel had prepared it.

The view of the "unblemished" Wehrmacht was shaken by the material evidence put on public display in different cities including Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Bielefeld, Vienna, and Leipzig. On March the 9th, 1999 at 4:40am, a bomb attack on the exhibition occurred in Saarbrücken, damaging the adult high school building housing the exhibition and the adjoining Schlosskirche church.

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