Had the matter amounted to no more than this, international press coverage would have been unlikely, but the reasons behind this German clash were, in fact, newsworthy. Part of Germany's postwar identity has involved the belief that, whatever the evil Hitler and his Nazis did, the Wehrmacht (the World War II-era German Army) had fought with honor that the Holocaust could not besmirch. Many Germans knew better, but impressions about the Army's nobility persisted in the public mind. Then, in March 1995, an exhibition titled Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941-1944 (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht) began to appear in German and Austrian venues. This exhibition of photographs and documents confirmed that the Wehrmacht implemented genocidal policies directed at Jews and Gypsies. The Army also engaged in mass killings of defenseless Slavic people in Poland, Serbia, and the Soviet Union, and it was responsibile for the deaths of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war. This controversial exhibition, viewed by more than 820,000 people in 32 cities as of late spring 1999, provoked considerable dissenting protests. Before the Cologne disturbance clashes between left- and right-wing groups took place in the southwestern German city of Saarbrücken. There, more than 100 leftists, defenders of the exhibit, were arrested when they contested rightist protests against the exhibit's depiction of Wehrmacht atrocities.