Nazi Propaganda Exhibitions in the Neue Burg
In the years of the National Socialist dictatorship, the Neue Burg served as a venue for several propaganda exhibitions.The special exhibition New Acquisitions 1938–40 by the Art Historical Museum was, effectively, the product of a mass campaign of art theft from people persecuted for being Jewish. At the same time, the museum opened an exhibition in another eight rooms of the Neue Burg under the title The Wiener Forum in Plans and Models, which was about the history of the Hofburg. The former imperial residence played an important role for the Nazis: they used it to tell a shared German story stretching seamlessly from the medieval German Reich via the Habsburg Monarchy to the present. They came up with plans, such as the construction of a monumental memorial on the Heldenplatz and designs for a Gauforum between Michaelerplatz and the imperial stables. They were intended to give themselves a central place in the centuries-old history of this residence and government complex.
In the same year, 1940, an open-air exhibition took place on Heldenplatz called Victory in the West. It was opened in the presence of the second-most senior Nazi functionary, Hermann Göring, and presented a varied selection of German weapons as well as captured French ones. An exhibition hall was constructed specially for the show. It had a huge central tower crowned by a Reichsadler and was visible from far away.
In late 1940 a Nazi propaganda show, originally conceived as a travelling exhibition, called Woman and Mother—the People’s Source of Life was put on in the Ethnological Museum (today the Weltmuseum). The catalogue, which appeared in multiple editions, gives an insight into this major exhibition that ranged from the “pre- and proto-Germanic age” to its own time. The exhibition’s ideology was racist and völkisch (the ethnic-nationalist glorification of the German “people”), conveying the Nazis’ conception of the role of women as housewives and mothers who must ensure the continued existence of the “Aryan race”. It made use of historical family portraits and images of famous women from history, along with art objects and writings from over the centuries. Quotes from leading National Socialists were painted on the walls and works by Nazi artists displayed the contradictory model of femininity championed by the Nazis. Women’s political role was limited to the racist and völkisch duty of motherhood and their increasing deployment as “labour comrades” in the arms industry.
A few months later, in March 1941, the special exhibition Armaments and Weapons. Restitutions from the Musée de l’Armée took place in the Neue Burg. Its aim was to present art objects looted from France as “German Property”.
Not far away in the imperial stables, which were also part of the former residence grounds (today the MuseumsQuartier), the National Socialist regime organised an exhibition from 1941–1942 on one of the central objects of its hatred, titled The Soviet Paradise. Within just a few weeks, it had attracted over 400,000 visitors.
Finally, the last Nazi propaganda spectacle in the Hofburg complex would also be its biggest. In 1944, under the title Our Army, the high command of the Wehrmacht, the Nazi armed forces, ordered an exhibition to demonstrate their prowess. In 31 rooms of the Neue Burg and on the Heldenplatz, the show glorified soldierly combat in the past and present. The weapons collection of the Art Historical Museum that had been exhibited here during the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship was given a new ideological charge, now becoming a way of visualising a supposed uniquely German valour and superiority. The exhibition was used as a means to commit society to “total war”. It is therefore no coincidence that it took place at a time when it was already obvious the German war effort had no hope of success.
