ABSTRACT
The Wehrmacht exhibition the first test case to see whether Austrians—was, their political representatives—are prepared including to face their complicity in National Socialism. The Wehrmacht exhibition has received more extensive media coverage than any other presentation dealing with history. Polarization has run along a clear line of cleavage: “libel of the Wehrmacht generation and indiscriminate generalization inferred from individual misdeeds” versus “violation of the taboo prohibiting a frank assessment of the crimes of the Wehrmacht.” The transfer and integration of Austrians into the Wehrmacht thus took place quite smoothly—in March 1938 the German Wehrmacht became the Wehrmacht of Greater Germany. Austrians fought side by side with their German comrades in what Omer Bartov called “Hitler’s Army.” The crimes of the Wehrmacht were “by their very nature, crimes of Everyman, crimes of everyone’s husband, father, brother, uncle, grandfather.” In Austria, the Wehrmacht exhibition has broken through the pregnant silence surrounding the Wehrmacht’s war of extermination.
