The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC is the American national institution for Holocaust documentation, education and remembrance. Established by an Act of Congress in 1980 and opened on 22 April 1993 in a building on Raoul Wallenberg Place adjacent to the National Mall, it is one of the two principal institutions in the world for Holocaust documentation alongside Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The museum has received over 47 million visitors since opening, of whom around 90 per cent are non-Jewish Americans; its annual visitor numbers in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic were around 1.7 million.
The founding
The institution was the result of a Presidential Commission on the Holocaust established by Jimmy Carter in 1978 under the chairmanship of Elie Wiesel. The Commission’s report, delivered to the President in September 1979, recommended the establishment of a national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, a museum to document the events, and an annual national Days of Remembrance observance. The recommendations were enacted into law by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council Act of 7 October 1980, which established the Council as a federal body to plan, build and operate the institution. The site was donated by the federal government in 1985; construction began in 1989 and was completed in 1993.
The museum building was designed by James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. The building’s design is itself part of the exhibition: an industrial brick exterior with steel watchtower elements references the architecture of the camps, and the interior public spaces are organised around the Hall of Witness, a large central space framed by four-storey brick walls that the visitor crosses to reach the permanent exhibition. The architectural intent was that the visitor should feel themselves placed inside the period the museum documents from the moment of entry.
The permanent exhibition and the artefacts
The permanent exhibition occupies three floors of the museum and follows a chronological structure from the rise of the regime through to the liberation of the camps and the post-war reckoning. It includes around 900 individual artefacts on display at any one time, drawn from a museum collection that runs to several tens of thousands of items. The most-cited artefacts include the original German railcar of the type used in deportations (a Karlsruhe-class freight wagon donated by the Polish railways in 1991), a substantial collection of shoes from the Majdanek camp, the milk can in which part of the Ringelblum Warsaw ghetto archive was buried (on long-term loan from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw), a casting of the original Auschwitz Arbeit Macht Frei gate, and the original Tower of Faces photographs from Eishyshok, the Lithuanian shtetl whose pre-war community was destroyed in September 1941.
The Tower of Faces is the museum’s most-discussed installation: a three-storey shaft hung with around 1,500 photographs of the Jewish residents of Eishyshok in the years before the destruction, donated by the survivor Yaffa Eliach, who had recovered the photographs from descendants and Polish neighbours after the war. The visitor passes through the Tower three times during the permanent exhibition; the photographs are the same on each pass; the meaning the visitor attributes to them changes as the exhibition’s narrative around them deepens.
The archives and the research work
The museum holds the largest archive of Holocaust documentation outside Yad Vashem and Bad Arolsen. The collections include over 30 million documents, around 100,000 photographs, around 18,000 hours of recorded video and audio testimony, around 1,100 hours of historical film and 120,000 artefacts. The archives have been progressively digitised; the museum’s online collections platform is the principal English-language access point for many primary documents, including the captured German records that the museum acquired through the post-war exchanges. The museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, established in 1998, is the principal American academic centre for Holocaust research and produces a substantial publication programme of monographs, edited volumes and conference proceedings each year.
The museum’s Visual History Archive, separate from the USC Shoah Foundation’s larger collection, holds testimony recorded by the museum’s own oral history programme since the late 1980s, including the survivor interviews that informed the original exhibition design. The archives have been used in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals into the 2010s and have provided documentary support for several of the late Demjanjuk-pattern late prosecutions of camp guards in Germany.
The standing of the institution
The museum is, with Yad Vashem, the principal institution in the world for Holocaust documentation and education. Its position within the American Holocaust education infrastructure is central; its position within the wider American national-museum landscape, on the Mall in Washington, has given it a continuing public presence that few other Holocaust institutions can match. The museum has, since the 1990s, expanded its mandate beyond the Holocaust itself to include genocide prevention and the documentation of subsequent atrocities (Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, the persecution of the Rohingya); the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, established in 2012, is the principal American institutional voice on contemporary genocide-prevention work.
See also
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Raoul Wallenberg
- Elie Wiesel
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- The Wiener Holocaust Library London
- Nazi Hunters Overview
Sources
- Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, Viking, 1995 (the standard institutional history)
- Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler. How History Is Bought, Packaged and Sold, Routledge, 1999 (chapter on USHMM)
- Hilene Flanzbaum (ed), The Americanization of the Holocaust, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999
- James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, 1993
- Liliane Weissberg, “Memory Confined”, in Documents, no 4-5, 1994 (architectural analysis of the Freed building)
- Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, Little Brown, 1998
- President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Report to the President, 27 September 1979
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org
- USHMM Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, https://www.ushmm.org/research/center