DEN BOSCH, the Netherlands — What do the Volkswagen Beetle, Germany’s autobahn highway system and oak trees all have in common? They were all used as symbols of German strength and ingenuity, part of Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine intended to market Nazi ideology.

A new exhibition at the Design Museum Den Bosch in the Netherlands, “Design of the Third Reich,” which runs through Jan. 19, 2020, presents those and other elements of National Socialist-era German design as examples of a moment in 20th-century history that the museum’s officials say we would do well to grasp more fully.

“All our art history books run from 1890, when modernism started, to 1939 or 1940, and begin again in 1945,” Timo de Rijk, the museum’s director and the curator of the exhibition, said in an interview last week. “We’ve skipped something: A large part of what existed there, which is crucial to understanding what happened afterward — and also what came before — is not understood. I want to change that.”