Off in a side room, a pastor waits, ready to try to give spiritual solace and support to those who may become too distressed at what they are seeing.The scene is a Hamburg art exhibition gallery, and the subject matter is a dark one -- the role of Nazi Germany's armed forces, the Wehrmacht, in what became known as the Holocaust in World War II. Now four years old, the exhibition Vernichtungskrieg -- Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 (War of Annihilation - Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-1944) has so far been shown in 33 cities of Germany and Austria, drawing by latest count more than 8,20,000 visitors.

Everywhere, it has provoked angry demonstrations by neo-Nazi groups, denunciations by manystill-surviving Wehrmacht veterans, law suits and heated public debates. In Saarbruecken, it was damaged by a bomb blast. The liberal Die Zeit newspaper called the exhibition ``the most important contemporary history of recent years''. Bayernkurier, the organ of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union party, called it a ``campaign of annihilation against the German people''. At the core of the exhibition is the aim to explode a long-enduring myth about Germany and the Holocaust: the role of the regular armed forces in the genocidal acts of the Nazi regime.

For decades after World War II, Germans shouldered the guilt of the Holocaust by placing the responsibility on the fanaticism of the Nazis and the elite `SS' and special police.

At the same time, the post-war West German military wove a kind of legend about a ``clean war'' -- the argument going that the normal rank-and-file German soldiers fought honourably on the field of battle, albeit for a wrong cause. But Vernichtungskrieg --organised byhistorian Hannes Heer with documents from the federal archives in Koblenz and the German military archives in Freiburg -- tells a different story, of how some Wehrmacht units were actively part of the Holocaust machinery.

Among the most shocking images are the photographs of mass hangings and firing squad executions carried out by normal Wehrmacht soldiers on men, women and children in places like Serbia, Greece, Poland and the Soviet Union during Wehrmacht occupation.

Opponents have also tried to stop the exhibition by filing for temporary restraining orders, alleging that the show incites ethnic unrest or injures the dignity of both living and dead former soldiers by serving up a ``blanket condemnation'' of the Wehrmacht and all who served in it. But Heer says the exhibition is meant ``to destroy the myth of the `clean war','', which amounted to a blanket white-washing of the military. Ultimately, it will help people to judge this dark part of German history more discerningly.