How other countries deal with objectionable monuments
The waning days of the Confederacy did not look so different from the last hours of Nazi Germany. As Matthew Schofield of McClatchy Newspapers explained: “Flags were torn down while defeated cities still burned, even as citizens crawling from the rubble were just realizing that the governments they represented had ended.”
But decades — and centuries — later, symbols of those regimes are treated quite differently.
In the United States, the Confederacy is celebrated even today. There are more than 700 Confederate monuments in public parks, courthouse squares and state capitols nationwide. (They’re not all old, either — North Carolina has added 35 such markers since 2000.) The Confederate flag still waves high above some statehouses in the South. Not so in Germany. In 1949, the new-found Federal Republic of Germany banned the swastika from public life. And since 1945, its government has worked to systematically get rid of Nazi-era memorials and architecture. Nazi officials were buried in unmarked graves. Swastikas were ground off buildings. Monuments and statues from the Third Reich were torn down. The military jail that housed high-ranking Nazi officials awaiting their war-crimes trials was torn down, so that it would not become a shrine for neo-Nazis. (According to Schofield, “Officials went so far as to pulverize the bricks and throw the remains into the North Sea.”) Zeppelin Field, former home of Nazi party rallies, was fenced off and visitors warned to keep away.
Even Adolf Hitler’s bunker, where he killed himself, was sealed in the early 1990s, after Germany’s reunification. Today, it sits underneath a parking lot marked only with a small plaque. (In November 2016, private investors paid to restore and reopen the bunker to visitors as a historical exhibition, a controversial decision that upset the city’s historians and Jewish leaders.)
In other instances, Germany has converted the seats of Nazi power into educational spaces. Germans turned the head- quarters of the Gestapo, the SS and the Reich Security Service into a museum called the Topography of Terror, which tells of the horrors carried out by those who worked there. The Nazi-era High Command of the Armed Forces has been converted into the German Resistance Memorial Center. Berlin’s Olympic stadium, used by Hitler to glorify fascism during the 1936 Games, was reopened for a celebration of Jewish athletes. (German students spend part of each year learning about the atrocities of Nazi Germany and are required to visit at least one concentration camp before they graduate.)
In other countries, there are echoes of Germany’s approach. In Bucharest, Romania, at least six statues of Marshal Ion Antonescu have been removed in recent years. Antonescu conspired with Hitler, helping him kill at least 250,000 Jews during the Second World War.
In Spain, authorities have set about renaming streets that commemorate Francisco Franco. In 2006, the Spanish parliament passed a law requiring every province in the country to remove Franco statues. But the dictator’s body is still housed in a shrine called the Valley of the Fallen; critics say the prominent placement serves only to glorify his reign.
In other places, it’s more complicated. Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force still uses the Rising Sun flag, a controversial symbol of the country’s imperial history. And Prime Minister Shinzo Abe still sends offerings to Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead. China and South Korea see Abe’s actions as glorifying Japan’s wartime crimes.
In Italy, Mussolini nostalgics still participate in thrice-yearly pilgrimages to the leader’s tomb. On Ponza, where Mussolini was imprisoned in 1943, a summer festival dramatizes his stay.