It is estimated that from 40,000 to 60,000 men, women and children were murdered on orders from Hitler and Himmler between August 5 and 7, 1944, during the early stage of the Warsaw Uprising.
The exhibition in the German capital addresses the issue of responsibility for the August 1944 crime, according to a spokesman for the Berlin Centre of Poland’s Pilecki Institute, Patryk Szostak.
He said the exhibits include an interview which Heinz Reinefarth, known as the "Butcher of Warsaw" recorded for West German television in 1964.
In it, the former SS commander denies the crimes, saying that even if any crimes took place he did not have any knowledge about their scale and arguing that Polish civilians were executed because they fought against the Germans.
After the war, Reinefarth became mayor of the town of Westerland and a member of the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag, a regional parliament in Germany. He died in 1979.
The Berlin exhibition features extensive documentation of the criminal proceedings against Reinefarth, Szostak said. He told the media that Reinefarth was never brought to account because of "the lack of the political will in the German judicial system and society in those years."
On display is also a collection of over 30 photographs taken at the sites of the mass executions in Warsaw by German historian Hanns von Krannhals in 1962.
The Pilecki Institute is named after Witold Pilecki, a Polish World War II soldier who became a symbol of resistance to both Nazi and communist occupation.
In 1940, Pilecki allowed himself to be arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz in order to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions there. In 1943, after escaping from the camp, he reached Warsaw, and a year later fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
After the war he went to Italy and joined the Second Corps, part of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. He was then sent to communist-ruled Poland as an intelligence agent.
He was captured and executed by Poland’s communist authorities three years after the end of World War II. In 1990, Pilecki was rehabilitated and in 2008 posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state decoration. His burial place has never been found.
(mk/gs)