For decades the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" served German society as a way to avoid confronting the crimes of Nazism, preventing German soldiers from becoming involved in the annihilation war in the East. But also preventing the image of the perpetrator from being represented. The Vernichtungskrieg exhibition. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (1995-1999) was the first time that German society directly faced these crimes, which involved a large part of it. And, for the first time, put face to some of the perpetrators of the crimes. The exhibition opened new lines of research for historians on the mentality of the soldiers, material sources, motives of the perpetrators, etc. The reaction to the exhibition fostered a historiographic debate that has allowed it to face its past more openly, one more step in the Vergangenheitsbewältigung about the Nazi past. The investigation into the social identity of the perpetrators has just begun, but the narratives are developing in a similar way to that of the Holocaust in the mid-1970s. The controversy demonstrated, once again and as Nolte points out, that the past ?has not past".