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- BERLIN (AFP) - A row is raging
here about whether the World War II Ge rmany army was wrongly accused of
atrocities in a four-year-old exhibition of period photographs.
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- Polish historian Bogdan Musial, who examined the 801
photos under the magnifying glass, said that at least nine captions were
untruthful.
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- In one, a so-called "Pogrom at Tarnapol" showing
Wehrmacht soldiers next to a mass grave, in fact was a picture of a massacre
perpetrated several days before, apparently by the Soviet secret police
(NKVD), Musial and two of his colleagues said in a study.
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- It was published in the three-monthly contemporary history
review published by the reputed Munich-based Contemporary History Institute.
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- Another photo, claiming to show an execution by German
soldiers, in fact showed troops wearing Hungarian helmets.
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- The three historians did say that most of the photographs
showed there was no doubt about the culpability of the Wehrmacht, but the
erroneous captions have nevertheless cast a cloud over the exhibition as
a whole.
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- In a virulent two-page opinion piece in the daily Berliner
Zeitung, historian Joerg Friedrich castigated the show as "the end
of the legend of a clean exhibition," alluding to its title "The
Crimes of the Wehrmacht or the end of the legend of a clean army."
The Wehrmacht was often been praised for its decent behaviour in comparison
with that of the Nazis, the Gestapo and the SS.
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- Friedrich, who wrote a book about the German army's role
in Russia, said that the Sixth Army, which surrendered in Stalingrad, had
never set foot in Tarnopol, where it was accused of killing Jews in the
photos.
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- The organiser of the exhibition, historian Hannes Heer,
defended himself by saying that had taken a number of pictures from libraries
and that the original captions had been kept.
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- But then he said on Sunday that he was ready to make
"corrections" and that a committee of historians would review
the contested points.
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- The argument is all the more embarrassing because the
itinerant exhibition, which has been seen by more than 700,000 people,
is to go on show next year in Washington, at the Holocaust Museum.
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- The row has been grist to the mill for right-wing extremists
who have denounced the exhibition and its financial backer, cigarette manufacturer
Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, for showering opprobrium on a whole generation of
German fighters.
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- Extremists have organised protest demonstrations in many
of the 32 towns where the exhibition was staged, including two bomb attacks
at Erfurt in 1996 and one in Sarrebruck last month.
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- Prosecutor Willi Dressen, who heads an international
service probing Nazi crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, south-western Germany,
fuelled the controversy on Sunday by saying that some of the photos, taken
from police records and purporting to show Wehrmacht brutality, should
be re-evaluated because "their origin and date" were uncertain.
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- "It would be a good thing if the photographs were
thoroughly examined," Dressen said, echoing the view of a growing
number of Germans.
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