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Submitted by: Thomas Reimer
ycrtmr@ix.netcom.com
Dear colleagues,
[On the Wehrmacht Exhibition]: well, the show includes a great deal of
pictures showing not German but Hungarian, Croat, Finnish soldiers, and
even a few victims of the NKVD--who at least will get some exposure in a
world that continues to ignore the 25 million innocents butchered by Lenin
and Stalin. The rest scarcely hints how they came about--genocide or
counterpartisan warfare. It's not worth going at all. For more info, read
the relevant articles - Der Spiegel (in April, I think), Berliner
Morgenpost of 31 May, Ostpreussenblatt etc. - that showed how biased that
expo is. This was not new--in 1997-98, even Helmut Schmidt and Richard von
Weiszaecker criticised its bias. But now we even now that much of the
material itself is fake, and does not show what it purports to show.
The organizers were made aware of these shortcomings, among [others] by Dr.
Rolf-Dieter Mueller from the Militaergeschichtliches Forschungsamt in
Potsdam, but refused to correct their exhibit. To knowingly show fake
material, especially in an exposition that is likely to excite racism, may
hint at Reemtsma and Heer's agenda--which is a legitimate concern and not
an "ad hominem" [attack]. The media will again use the stuff to whip up
German-baiting and blanket innuendo against an entire group of people ...
and the scholarly checking and debunking will not be well known. How many
newspapers who played up Goldhagen did publish Birn and Finkelstein's
sobering fact-checking? Few! I hope enough historians will have the decency
(Zivilcourage) to set things straight in the press.
Viel Vergnuegen
Thomas Reimer
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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