Ernst Friedrich’s Anti-war Museum in Berlin, 1925–1933 (1986)

To remember the horrors of the 1914–1918 war and learn lessons, the German anarchist and anti-militarist Ernst Friedrich opened an anti-war museum that also served as a peace education center, especially for young people. The museum displayed many photographs, drawn from his bestselling book, War against War! (1924), which contrasted the rhetoric of military heroism and national glory with the sordidness and pity of war. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they destroyed his museum and converted the building into a torture chamber. Friedrich fled to Switzerland and then Belgium where he reestablished his museum. Following the Nazi occupation, he fled to France. After the war, with compensation received from the West German government, he bought an island in the Seine River near Paris and established a reconciliation center for French and German youth.