Munich will open a museum on the former site of the Nazi party headquarters today, in a long overdue reckoning with the German city's status as the "home of the movement".
The inauguration coincides with the 70th anniversary of the "liberation" of Munich by US troops at the end of World War II, and of Adolf Hitler's suicide the same day in a Berlin bunker.
Ageing American veterans and Holocaust survivors will join political leaders for a solemn ceremony at the new museum, a modern white cube built among a few surviving neo-classical buildings in what was the Nazis' organisational nerve centre.
Museum director Winfried Nerdinger admitted that it had taken Munich too long to face up to its toxic legacy as the birthplace of Hitler's party, a fact long shrouded in shameful silence.
"Munich had a harder time with this than all the other cities in Germany because it is also more tainted than any other city," said Nerdinger, the son of a local resistance member.
"This is where it all began."
Nerdinger said the aim of the "Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism" was to address how Munich, which prided itself on its thriving arts scene and convivial beer gardens, could see its civic spirit so perverted.
The four-floor exhibition offers explanatory texts in English and German, and period photographs and videos documenting jackboot marches and the city's utter destruction by Allied bombing.
A chilling video graphic portrays the city's Jewish community as points of light, with more and more extinguished as the deportations to the concentration camps gathered pace.
Nerdinger noted that he intentionally avoided displays full of crisp brown uniforms and giant swastika flags, saying he had no desire to showcase the Nazi "aesthetic".
Instead, visitors find artifacts such as hand-scrawled sonnets found in the pocket of resistance member Albrecht Haushofer, who was executed just before the war's end. Blood still stains the paper.
The German Workers' Party was founded in a Munich beer hall in 1919, and Hitler joined the same year.
In 1920, it became the National Socialist Germans Workers' Party, the only political force allowed in the country after Hitler's rise to power.
Following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler used his subsequent trial for high treason as a platform to gain a national following.
A thwarted communist revolution and a crippling economic depression helped fuel a backlash that would turn Munich into a "hotbed of reactionary sentiment", as the novelist Thomas Mann called it in 1926.
Here far-right thugs would find funding and legitimacy from the wide swathes of the upper middle class, which saw in Hitler a saviour.
