The Holocaust Galleries of the Imperial War Museum in London are the principal British public exhibition on the Holocaust and the largest dedicated Holocaust gallery in the United Kingdom. The current galleries opened on 20 October 2021 after a five-year redevelopment costing £30.7 million; they replaced the original Holocaust Exhibition that had opened at the same museum on 6 June 2000 and had been continuously open until the redevelopment closed it for renovation in 2018. The galleries occupy 1,200 square metres on the second floor of the Lambeth Road museum building and present the history of the Holocaust through artefacts, photographs, documents, film and survivor testimony.
The 2000 exhibition
The original exhibition was the first dedicated Holocaust exhibition at any British national museum. It had been commissioned by the Imperial War Museum’s Director General, Robert Crawford, in the early 1990s as part of a wider rethinking of the museum’s coverage of the Second World War. The exhibition was developed by a curatorial team led by Suzanne Bardgett, who became Head of Holocaust and Genocide History at the museum, working with an academic advisory board that included David Cesarani, Yehuda Bauer and Martin Gilbert. The exhibition opened on 6 June 2000 to substantial critical acclaim and became, over the next eighteen years, one of the museum’s most-visited permanent exhibitions, attracting around 350,000 visitors per year.
The 2000 exhibition was the British public’s principal point of contact with the Holocaust as a museum experience for the first two decades of the new century. It was the institution that for many British secondary-school pupils and their teachers provided the structured educational encounter with the subject that no British school curriculum on its own could provide.
The 2021 redevelopment
The redevelopment was undertaken between 2018 and 2021. The decision had been taken on grounds that the 2000 exhibition was, by the late 2010s, dated in its display technology, in its historiographical framing (which had reflected the state of the field in the mid-1990s when it was designed), and in its presentation of testimony (the original exhibition had relied principally on text panels and photographs; the redeveloped galleries make extensive use of video testimony from survivors recorded by the museum from the 1990s onwards). The funding was a combination of state grant, private donation and a major contribution from the Pears Foundation.
The new galleries were designed by the architectural practice Casson Mann, who had also designed the original 2000 exhibition. The redesign substantially restructured the visitor route, opened up the gallery space to allow larger displays, and introduced an extensive use of video and audio testimony alongside the original artefact-based presentation. The artefacts on display include over 2,000 individual objects, photographs and documents, of which the most significant include a section of the railway track from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the funicular hut from the Majdanek camp, a Star of David yellow badge from the Łódź ghetto, and a substantial collection of personal effects of Holocaust victims given to the museum by survivors and their families.
The educational work
The galleries are integrated with a substantial educational programme. The museum runs structured visits for around 30,000 school students per year, supported by curriculum materials developed with the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. The Holocaust Learning Programme provides teacher training, online resources and outreach work. The museum’s archives, which include over 1,500 hours of survivor video testimony recorded since the 1990s, are available to researchers and to schools through the museum’s online platform.
The Holocaust and Genocide History team at the museum, of which Bardgett was the founding head, has continued to operate as a research and curatorial unit responsible for the galleries, the testimony archive, the educational programme and the museum’s wider Holocaust-related publications. The team has produced a number of substantial monographs and exhibition catalogues over the past two decades.
The standing of the galleries
The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries are now the principal British national institutional response to the Holocaust at scale. Combined with the Beth Shalom Centre at Newark, the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, and the educational work of the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and the Holocaust Educational Trust, they constitute the British infrastructure for Holocaust education and public engagement. The proposed Westminster Holocaust Memorial, addressed elsewhere on this site, has been the subject of long parliamentary discussion and is not yet built; the Imperial War Museum galleries remain, until and unless that proposal is realised, the central British public-museum encounter with the subject.
See also
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- The British Dimension
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Wiener Holocaust Library London
- Bergen-Belsen and the British Response
Sources
- Suzanne Bardgett, Building the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Imperial War Museum, 2000
- Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, Routledge, 2014
- Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, Manchester University Press, 2010
- James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, 1993
- Imperial War Museum, “The Holocaust Galleries”, https://www.iwm.org.uk
- UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk
- Holocaust Educational Trust, https://www.het.org.uk