THE MUNICH NAZI MUSEUM

We are seven decades since the end of the Second World War.

And the city of Munich is looking at itself long and hard. The new free admission Nazi Museum - Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism - opened a fortnight ago. "Late, but not too late" says the city's mayor Dieter Reiter.

In its detailed and shocking documentation of the role of the city and its people in the seeding, nurturing and embrace of Nazism and moreover how it to date has avoided and or embraced its guilt and recompense, it asks key questions - What has this got to do with me? Why is this still a concern today? - while sensitising the public to current problems of racism, intolerance and exclusion.

The museum is located on the grounds of the "Brown House", the former headquarters of the NSDAP. on the edge of Königsplatz where over ten years the party machinery expanded to 6,000 across 68 buildings, some still nearby.

There are four floors of permanent exhibition:
Level 4 - Origins and Rise of the Nazi Movement, 1918-1933
Level 3 - Dictatorship and Society in National Socialism, 1933-1939
Level 2 - Munich and the War, 1939-1945
Level 2&1 - Dealing with the Nazi Era after 1945

It is not surprisingly very disturbing, seeing, with the closeted mind of one far away born, the species, our species, at work in grizzly detail. Not that we antipodeans have a clean slate, far from it; it's just that we are still in denial.

Königsplatz became the setting for rallies and massive stagings of cult worship of the Party and the Führer and today is the home of the Glyptothek museums.