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BERLIN — Within the warehouse of a 450-year-old citadel in a suburb of Berlin, an oversized bust sits in the dark, waiting to be restored.

The giant marble head has seen better days — its skin is scuffed, its ears are chipped and its nose is missing — but even in this run-down state, its severe hairstyle and Charlie Chaplin mustache ensure it’s instantly recognizable. It’s a monumental portrait of Adolf Hitler — and it’s remarkably rare.

“Unlike other dictators, Hitler didn’t want to create a traditional cult of personality around his person, at least not with statues,” said Urte Evert, director of the Spandau Citadel museum in western Berlin. “He didn’t like seeing depictions of himself.”

Evert said that the bust, which was recently found by construction workers digging in Berlin, was likely made for one of the government ministries of the Third Reich. Shortly after it was uncovered, it was loaded onto a truck and sent to Evert, to join the rogues gallery of formerly revered figures who now reside at the citadel, home to the world’s only museum of “retired” monuments.

The marble and bronze Teutonic knights, Prussian generals, Russian revolutionary leaders, Nazi “supermen” and East German border guards that intermingle in the halls of Evert’s museum embody wildly different ideals, but they’re united by one common trait: Once they were honored as examples worth following; today they’re pariahs, out of step with modern values.

The collection of statues is a powerful reminder of the fickle nature of popular idolatry, and it offers one answer to the question: What’s to be done with problematic monuments to a discredited past? Should statues that no longer reflect our values — or ones that even revolt us — be destroyed? Hidden away? Or kept up and contextualized as reminders of a painful history?

The Spandau Citadel aside, Germany’s answer to the question was unequivocal. After the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus that destruction was the only valid course of action. Over the course of a year, the American, British, French and Soviet military authorities occupying Germany banned “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia” glorifying German militarism or the Nazi Party.

The bronze monument honoring the Nazi victims of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich was broken into pieces. A giant marble swastika presiding over the party’s parade grounds in Nuremberg was blown up with dynamite. In bombed-out Berlin, what remained of Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery was razed and streets honoring Nazi figures were renamed.

Even then, not all traces of Hitler’s regime were completely wiped out. Soviet authorities in Berlin kept some Nazi statues, including bronze horses once displayed in the Führer’s headquarters, and installed them on a nearby military base.

“They painted them gold and kept them up until they left after the [Berlin] Wall fell,” said Evert. “Everyone knew they were Nazi statues but no one said anything, of course.”

Berlin’s approach stands in marked contrast to that of the original home of fascism: In Rome, reminders of Benito Mussolini are everywhere.

Just a stone’s throw from the Bocca della Veritá, the city’s registry office still sports a marble plaque that notes its inauguration by Il Duce. Across town, a 57-foot-tall obelisk bearing the inscription “Mussolini Dux” presides over a 1930s sports complex with a mosaic pavement on which the dictator’s initials appear over and over again.

And then there’s the EUR district, a fascist-era complex dominated by the iconic Square Coliseum, which still has a quote by Mussolini etched on its façade, and the Palazzo degli Uffici, which features a marble relief in which Mussolini appears alongside Italian heroes like Giuseppe Garibaldi.

While many monuments were destroyed after Mussolini’s ouster in 1943, for Italians recovering from the war, destroying them just wasn’t a priority.

“Citizens’ groups pushed for the removal of the most obvious symbols of fascist propaganda, like the fasces, but there were so many of them that they were hard to get rid of altogether, and their demands were overshadowed by more relevant concerns,” said Giulia Albanese, a professor of history at Padua University who has written a book tracking the presence of fascist symbols throughout the country.

An estimated 1,400 fascist monuments remain in cities across Italy. In 2014, when then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi launched Rome’s 2024 Olympics bid, he did so standing in front of the “Apotheosis of Fascism,” a monumental mural featuring Mussolini as a godlike figure.

Albanese acknowledged that while Italy needed to do a better job of contextualizing the fascist monuments that remain in public spaces, it didn’t make sense to destroy them “at this point.”

There’s “no one-size-fits-all solution” to what to do with discredited monuments, said Evert, of the Spandau Citadel museum. She said she sympathized with protesters who had destroyed statues of colonizers in South America or toppled commemorations of enslavers in the United Kingdom or the United States, but she also believed there was value in at least some hateful monuments.

“It is important to preserve these statues, within a museum or even in their original locations out in the open, with proper historical contextualization,” she said. “Even though encountering them can be uncomfortable or even hurtful, those emotions help us learn from the past and reflect on the values we have as a society.”

People are complicated, she said, and even the most controversial figures had aspects worthy of emulation. “In places like Great Britain, there is still a big conversation to be had about figures like Winston Churchill, who was a great politician but also a defender of colonialism and racist ideologies,” she said.

“Perhaps it’s easier for us in Germany because we are used to the idea that people are not absolute saints or monsters,” she added.

She did, however, make one exception: “There was nothing good about Hitler,” she said.