Archive Of Previous Special Exhibitions

For many decades to this day, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have been campaigning to ensure that the crimes of the National Socialists are not forgotten and that the perpetrators are prosecuted.

When, in October 1966, Albert Speer was released from twenty years’ internment at the prison for war criminals in Spandau, Berlin, he began a second career as a celebrated and seemingly reformed witness of the National Socialist era.

In late 1941, two Viennese scholars developed a project “to research typical Eastern European Jews.” The following March, using the “cold eye of science,” they took photographs of more than a hundred Jewish families in the German-occupied Polish city of Tarnów.

Fritz Bauer was one of the most important and legally influential returned Jewish emigrants in post-war Germany. As a district attorney, he initiated important criminal proceedings against Nazi perpetrators, in particular the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, despite considerable opposition.

The exhibition of the Permanent Conference of National Socialist Memorial Sites in the Berlin Area addresses the events in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain, as well as the associated culture of remembrance.

The touring exhibition from the Musée national de la Résistance in Esch-sur-Alzette addresses the little-known history of the persecution of the Jews in Luxembourg.

By January 1945, with the failure of the last major German offensive in the Ardennes, it was clear to everybody that Germany had lost the war it had begun in 1939. But instead of surrendering, Hitler’s government continued fighting the war and mobilised all its available reserves.

When the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 there were 140,000 Jews living in the country. The German occupiers implemented increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures. In all, 107,000 men, women and children were deported to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

The exhibition shows the extent to which the Reich Ministry of Labour, portrayed until now as having had little influence, supported the Nazi dictatorship.

The “Warsaw Rising”, which began on 1 August 1944, is the focus of the exhibition. The uprising of the Polish Home Army lasted 63 days before it was conclusively put down by the SS, police and Wehrmacht

Eighty years after the German state and the Nazi Party waged a terror campaign against Jews in November 1938, the exhibition “Kristallnacht” retraces the events of that time.

“Aktion Reinhardt” was the code name of the SS for the planned mass murder of the Polish Jews.

The People's Court was created by the Nazis in 1934 to combat “enemies of the state”. This new political supreme court tried over 16,700 people until the end of the Second World War. From 1942 onwards, half of all the defendants received the death sentence.

n pictures and documents, it highlights the key stages in the establishment of Nazi rule during the first six months of the Third Reich in the historical setting of Berlin.

The exhibition explores the use of these images in books, newspapers, and magazines of the time that were published by Darré, his publishing house, or within his sphere.

The Exhibition broaches the issue of 1938, which marked a culmination in the violence and terror that had accompanied the National Socialist regime since its beginnings in 1933.

The exhibition presents examples demonstrating the difficulties of establishing monuments and memorial sites for the Nazi crimes in West Berlin, thereby focussing on the so-called perpetrator sites.

What was the Nazis’ position on religion and the church—and specifically on Martin Luther? And how did the relationship between church and state evolve during those twelve years? These questions are explored in the exhibition.

Central to the exhibition are five photographs documenting the murder of around 1,500 men, women and children in Mizocz, eastern Poland (now Ukraine) on 14 October 1942.

For more than 20 years they have been part of the urban image of Berlin. Thus, the exhibition wants to introduce the often unknown groundwork and manifold facets of this European art and remembrance project.

The visual center of the exhibition was formed by a large urban model representing the Nazi Party Rally Grounds with the plans of architect Albert Speer.

A few Jewish photographers, commissioned by the Litzmannstadt “Jewish Council,” took thousands of photographs of almost every aspect of ghetto life. Nearly 12,000 contact prints have survived and are currently held in the Lodz state archive.

After 1945, Hans Bayer became publicly known as a literary figure, journalist and celebrated Swabian poet under the name of Thaddäus Troll. He concealed the fact that as a member of the propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1945.

The Nazi persecution policies also targeted people who were sick or disabled. Beginning in 1934, up to 400,000 people were sterilized against their will and more than 200,000 were murdered in mental hospitals and institutions.

The exhibition describes the heightened persecution of Jews in the Third Reich from June 1938 onwards and the impact of the wave of violence in November 1938 on Jewish communities.

Thirteen selected newspapers (displayed as facsimiles) and journalist portraits illustrate the different journalistic strategies pursued by the newspapers and the leeway in action and thought that was available for publishers, journalists, and readers.

Wilhelmstraße and its surrounding area became the centre of German politics from the end of the 19th century. With all the main ministries and government offices based there, the name ”Wilhelmstraße” soon became a common synonym for the German government.

Over seventy years after the systematic extermination of physically and mentally handicapped individuals began in 1939/1940, this exhibition recollected this dark chapter, the “child euthanasia” program during the Nazi period.

The series of pictures shown here, which encompasses 42 photographs of the deportation of the Jews in Lörrach on October 22, 1940 and of the auctioning of property from their homes a few weeks after this public crime, is a devastating visual document of those events.

This exhibition, designed around the original film footage from the courtroom, was dedicated to these two aspects of the trial: witness testimony and the perpetrator’s strategy.

The exhibition presents photos from a service album belonging to SS-Obersturmführer Karl Otto Koch that was found in the archive of the Russian secret service in Moscow.