Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

About

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Polish: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau) is a museum on the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim, Poland, which was operated by Nazi Germany. The site includes the main concentration camp at Auschwitz I and the remains of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Both were developed and run by Nazi Germany during its occupation of Poland in 1939–1945. The Polish government has preserved the site as a research centre and in memory of the 1.1 million people who died there, including 960,000 Jews, during World War II and the Holocaust. It became a World Heritage Site in 1979. Piotr Cywiński has served as the museum's director since 2006.

The museum was created in April 1946 by Tadeusz Wąsowicz and other former Auschwitz prisoners, acting under the direction of Poland's Ministry of Culture and Art. It was formally founded on July 2, 1947, by an act of the Polish parliament. The site consists of 20 hectares (49 acres) in Auschwitz I and 171 hectares (420 acres) in Auschwitz II, which lies about three kilometres from the main camp. Over 25 million people have visited the museum. From 1955 to 1990, the museum was directed by one of its founders and former inmates, Kazimierz Smoleń. In 2019, 2,320,000 people visited the site, including visitors from Poland (at least 396,000), the United Kingdom (200,000), United States (120,000), Italy (104,000), Germany (73,000), Spain (70,000), France (67,000), Israel (59,000), Ireland (42,000), and Sweden (40,000).

The first exhibition in the barracks opened in 1947. In Stalinist Poland, on the seventh anniversary of the first deportation of Polish captives to Auschwitz, the exhibition was revised with the assistance of former inmates. The exhibition was influenced by the Cold War and next to pictures of Jewish ghettos, photos of slums in the US were presented. After Stalin's death, a new exhibition was planned in 1955. In 1959, every nation that had victims in Auschwitz received the right to present its own exhibition. However, victims like homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, and Yeniche people did not receive these rights. The state of Israel was also refused the allowance for its own exhibition as the murdered Jews in Auschwitz were not citizens of Israel. In April 1968, the Jewish exhibition, designed by Andrzej Szczypiorski, was opened. In 1979, Pope John Paul II held a mass in Birkenau and called the camp a "Golgotha of our times". In 1962, a prevention zone around the museum in Birkenau (and in 1977, one around the museum in Auschwitz) was established to maintain the historical condition of the camp. These zones were confirmed by the Polish parliament in 1999. In 1967, the first big memorial monument was inaugurated and in the 1990s the first information boards were set up.

Since 1960, the so-called "national exhibitions" have been located in Auschwitz I. Most of them were renewed from time to time; for example, those of Belgium, France, Hungary, Netherlands, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and the former Soviet Union. The German exhibition, which was made by the former GDR, has not been renewed. The first national exhibition of the Soviet Union was opened in 1961, and renewed in 1977 and 1985. In 2003, the Russian organizing committee suggested presenting a completely new exhibition. The Soviet part of the museum was closed, but the reopening was delayed due to the varying territorial situation of the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941. The question of the territories annexed by the USSR during the war, i.e. the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, and Moldova, could not be solved. The Yugoslav pavilion and exhibition, which memorialized Auschwitz victims primarily through their antifascist struggle, was opened in 1963. In 2002, Croatia, one of Yugoslav successor states, notified the Auschwitz Memorial Museum that it wanted the Yugoslav exhibition dismantled, demanding permission to establish its own national exhibition. The museum rejected the proposal and notified all Yugoslav successor states that only a joint renovated exhibit would be appropriate. Since the countries failed to do so, the Yugoslav exhibition was closed down in 2009 and its contents sent to the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, while Block 17, which hosted the exhibition, remains empty. In January 2024, the UNESCO announced that after 14 years of negotiations, six successor states of SFR Yugoslavia — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia — had reached an agreement to reopen a joint exhibition about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. In 1978, Austria opened its own exhibition, presenting itself as a victim of National Socialism. This one-sided view motivated Austrian political scientist Andreas Maislinger to work in the museum within the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace organization in 1980-81. Later he founded the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, the Gedenkdienst. Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschläger had advised Maislinger that as a young Austrian, he did not need to atone for anything in Auschwitz. Due to the disapproving attitude of Austrian officials, the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service could not be launched before September 1992.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.