The major Holocaust museums and libraries are the principal institutional homes of the documentary record. They hold the records, the photographs, the artefacts and the recorded testimony on which the historiography is built. They are also the institutions that present the events to a wider public, with the curatorial choices that public presentation requires. The pages in this cluster address each of the principal institutions in turn.
The principal museums
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, established in 1953 by an act of the Knesset, is the principal Israeli Holocaust institution. It holds the most substantial single archive of Holocaust documentation in the world, including the Pages of Testimony (the project to record the names of every Jewish individual murdered in the Holocaust, with around 4.8 million names recorded by 2026), the photographic archive, the survivor testimony collection, and the records of the Righteous Among the Nations programme.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, established in 1993 on the National Mall, is the principal American institution. Its permanent exhibition treats the Holocaust as a documented historical event presented in chronological sequence; its archive holds substantial collections of survivor testimony, captured German documents and post-war investigative records; its educational programmes reach hundreds of thousands of American students annually.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, established in 1947 on the site of the former camp, is the principal site museum. It receives around two million visitors a year, the highest figure for any Holocaust site or museum. The museum’s curatorial work has been substantially shaped by the difficulty of presenting a working camp site as a memorial without aestheticising what the site was.
The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries in London, opened in 2000 and substantially redesigned and reopened in 2021, is the principal British Holocaust institution. Its 2021 redesign was based on substantial consultation with survivors and their families and adopted a chronological-narrative approach with extensive use of personal artefacts.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, established in 1960 in the building where Anne Frank and her family had hidden, is the most-visited Holocaust site in western Europe. It receives around 1.2 million visitors a year. Its educational programmes reach the substantial proportion of European secondary-school pupils whose first contact with the Holocaust comes through Anne Frank’s diary.
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London, founded by Alfred Wiener in 1933 in Amsterdam and transferred to London in 1939, is the world’s oldest Holocaust library. Its collection includes substantial materials gathered by Wiener himself in the 1930s while the events were still in progress.
The Jewish Museum Berlin, opened in 2001 in the Daniel Libeskind building, treats two thousand years of German Jewish history of which the Holocaust is one part; the architectural treatment of the void as the central exhibit is its most-discussed curatorial decision.
Beth Shalom, the National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, is the principal British educational Holocaust centre, established in 1995 by the Smith family. The Holocaust Museum Houston, established in 1996, is the largest American Holocaust museum outside Washington.
The curatorial questions
The institutions in this cluster have answered, in different ways, a recurring set of curatorial questions. How do you present industrial murder without making it spectacle? How much of the most extreme material do you show? How do you handle the perpetrators (in their own words, in caricature, as historical agents)? How do you balance the chronological narrative against the personal stories of named individuals? The pages on each institution address how that institution has answered these questions, and what the historians and critics have made of the answers.