Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau) is the museum and memorial site at the former Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps in Oświęcim, southern Poland. It was established by the Polish parliament on 2 July 1947 as a state institution dedicated to the preservation and documentation of the camp site, on the recommendation of the surviving prisoners’ organisations who had returned to Oświęcim after liberation. It is the principal physical site of the Holocaust, the location of the killing of approximately 1.1 million people (the great majority Jews) between 1940 and 1945, and the most-visited Holocaust memorial site in the world, with around 2.3 million visitors per year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The site that was preserved

The museum site comprises two principal locations. Auschwitz I, the original camp established in May 1940 in the buildings of a former Polish army barracks, occupies around 20 hectares and is the location of the main camp gate with its Arbeit Macht Frei inscription, the original prisoner barrack blocks (most of which now house permanent exhibitions), the Block 11 cells where the first Zyklon B killings were tested in September 1941, the gas chamber and crematorium of the original camp (Crematorium I, used until 1942 and partially reconstructed by the museum in 1947), the Standing Cells and the death wall between Blocks 10 and 11. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, three kilometres north-west of Auschwitz I, was the principal killing site, occupying around 175 hectares; it includes the railway ramp where the deportation transports unloaded, the ruined remains of Crematoria II, III, IV and V (which were dynamited by the SS in November 1944 and January 1945 to destroy the evidence of the killing), the surviving prisoner barracks (around 60 of the original 300), the women’s camp, the family camp, the so-called Mexico camp, and the surviving “Kanada” warehouses where the property of the murdered was sorted.

The substantial preservation of both sites has been the central institutional task of the museum since its founding. The decision to preserve the camp substantially as it was found in 1945 (rather than, for example, demolishing it and replacing it with a memorial structure as was done at Treblinka) was contested in the late 1940s and early 1950s and has been periodically revisited since. The current consensus is that the site itself, as a physical place, is the central documentary record and that its preservation is the museum’s principal obligation. Substantial conservation work has been required throughout the museum’s existence; the brick barrack buildings at Birkenau, the wooden barrack remains, the surviving documents and the personal effects on display all require continuous active conservation against environmental damage.

The exhibitions and the artefacts

The permanent exhibitions are housed principally in the prisoner barrack blocks at Auschwitz I. The general exhibition, opened in 1955 and substantially renovated through the decades, documents the camp’s operation chronologically through photographs, documents and recovered artefacts. The most-cited rooms include the Hair Room (containing approximately two tons of human hair recovered from the camp at liberation, originally intended by the SS for industrial use as cushion-stuffing and textile fibre), the Suitcase Room (containing the personal suitcases recovered from the camp, many marked with the names and addresses of their owners in chalk), the Shoe Room (containing approximately 80,000 pairs of shoes), the Glasses Room and the Brushes Room. The artefacts in these rooms are in many cases all that remains of the named individuals to whom they belonged. The combined effect on visitors is, on the standard reports of museum staff and surveys, the central memory of an Auschwitz visit.

National exhibitions, organised by the governments of countries from which substantial deportations were made (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Germany, Yugoslavia and others), occupy individual barrack blocks and document the deportations and the experience of the national community. The exhibitions have been progressively renewed since the 1990s; the original Soviet-era national exhibitions were rewritten in many cases after 1989 to remove the political framings of the Cold War period.

The institutional management and the controversies

The museum is administered by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and operates under successive Polish governments with substantial international consultation. The International Auschwitz Council, established in 2000, includes representatives from countries with substantial deportee populations and survivor organisations and provides oversight of the museum’s principal decisions on preservation and exhibition policy. The current director of the museum is Piotr Cywiński, who has held the position since 2006.

The institution has been the subject of recurrent controversy through its history. The Polish-Jewish disputes over the Carmelite convent established in the early 1980s in a building adjacent to the main camp (resolved in 1993 with the relocation of the convent), over the cross erected near Block 11 in the late 1990s, over the Polish parliament’s 2018 law criminalising public attribution of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes, and the wider continuing question of how Polish-victim memory and Jewish-victim memory are presented at the site, have been the principal points of public dispute.

The museum’s wider work includes a substantial publication programme (the Auschwitz Studies series of monographs and document collections, the Pro Memoria bulletin, and various reference works), an extensive education programme, and the conservation laboratory that maintains the surviving records, photographs and artefacts.

The standing of the site

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the central physical site of the Holocaust and is, more than any other place, the location to which the world looks when it asks what happened. The museum has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979 (UNESCO renamed the site “Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp 1940-1945” in 2007 to clarify the responsibility for what happened there). The annual 27 January International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed at the site with public ceremonies attended by surviving prisoners (now very few) and by representatives of the world’s governments. The 80th anniversary of the liberation in January 2025 was the largest single commemorative event ever held at the site.

See also

Sources

  • Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press in association with USHMM, 1994 (the standard one-volume scholarly history)
  • Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums in Oświęcim, 1993 (the foundational work that established the standard 1.1 million figure)
  • Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
  • Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration 1945-1979, Ohio University Press, 2003
  • Imke Hansen, “Nichts war vergessen, niemand war vergessen”: Erinnerungskultur und kollektives Gedächtnis im sozialistischen Polen 1944-1989, Wallstein Verlag, 2015
  • Piotr M. A. Cywiński (ed), Auschwitz from A to Z: An Illustrated History of the Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2013
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, https://www.auschwitz.org
  • UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp 1940-1945”, https://whc.unesco.org