The large painting was made from 1920 to 1923, and was one of the several anti-war works by Dix in the 1920s, inspired by his experience of trench warfare in the First World War.

The work was condemned by the Nazis, confiscated and included in the exhibition of degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) held in Munich in 1937.

He was a founder of the short-lived avant-garde Dresdner Sezession art group and then supported the post-expressionist New Objectivity movement.

He started to develop a reputation for controversy: in 1925, Dix successfully defended himself against charges of indecency following exhibitions in Berlin and Darmstadt of two paintings of prostitutes.

[citation needed] It depicted the gory aftermath of an artillery bombardment of a German trench with the scene littered with the detritus of war: ruined building, military paraphernalia such as gas masks and fragmentary body parts from dead soldiers.

The best surviving contemporaneous description was published by Walter Schmits in the Kölnische Zeitung [de] in on 7 December 1923: Soon after it was completed, The Trench was acquired in October 1923 by the Wallraf–Richartz Museum in Cologne, the city then under Allied occupation, at the instigation of the museum's director Hans Friedrich Secker [de].

It was framed simply with plain wood and concealed behind a grey curtain, but it still shocked the public and brought protests from former soldiers.

Contemporary news reports suggest the controversy may have increased the number of people who visited the museum to view the painting.

The art historian Alfred Salmony [de], director of the Cologne Museum of Far Eastern Art [de], viewed the picture in Cologne in 1923, and describing it in Der Cicerone 16, published in January 1924, mentioning its "unerhörte Farben" ("outrageous colours") including a central yellow pool, and commending the truth of its depiction of war: "That is how it was on autumn days in the trenches south of Soissons.

Finally, the painting was acquired by Dresden City Museum in 1928, but it was still considered too controversial for a public collection to put on display.

Painted with the uncanny verisimilitude of wax works, this staggering vision of decay in death lives through the terrific loathing which Dix has concentrated in it [...] .

"[4] Dix became a professor[ambiguous] at the Dresden Academy in 1927, but he was one of the first artists to lose his job after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933.

Prominent Nazi visitors to the Dresden exhibition included Goebbels, Göring and Hitler, who remarked, "Es ist schade, daß man diese Leute nicht einsperren kann" ("It is a pity that these people cannot be imprisoned").

In June 1939, the painting was wanted by Georg Schmidt, the director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, and entered negotiations on buying it with the German art dealer Karl Buchholz, but the Museum-commission did not approve its purchase.

In the catalogue, it was described as "Gemalte Wehrsabotage des Malers Otto Dix" ("Painted military sabotage of the painter Otto Dix") and given a long entry which stated that in The Trench and his painting War Cripples: "Hier tritt die ‚Kunst' in den Dienst der marxistischen Propaganda für die Wehrpflichtverweigerung" ("Here, the 'art' enters the service of Marxist propaganda for conscientious objection").

The Trench was not included in the auction sale of some works of degenerate art by the German government in Lucerne in June 1939.