Top seven holocaust museums and memorials

AUSCHWITZ Birkenau was a concentration camp founded by the Nazis near the town of OŚWIĘCIM or “AUSCHWITZ” in Poland and which became the largest and most infamous camp of them all. Those interned at AUSCHWITZ were subject to the most horrific treatment, including forced labour, starvation, random executions and various forms of torture such as “medical experiments”. AUSCHWITZ was also the central location for Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers. By the time AUSCHWITZ was liberated by Soviet forces on 27 January 1945, the camp had claimed 1.3 million lives, the vast majority of whom were Jewish. AUSCHWITZ Museum is based at the original concentration camp site and offers visitors the chance to pass through the camp’s infamous arches bearing the chilling slogan of “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work will set you free”. Inside, visitors can tour AUSCHWITZ Birkenau individually or in group tours.

Anne Frank’s house was the site where German Jewish teenager and Holocaust victim Anne Frank, her family, the van Pels family and later a man called Fritz Pfeffer went into hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Tragically, the group’s whereabouts were betrayed to the Nazis and they were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, but her diary was later discovered by her father and published to worldwide acclaim.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC is dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust. Combining eyewitness testimony, displayed in films and documents, with over 900 artefacts including one of the railcars used to transport prisoners, the Holocaust Museum tells the story of this world event. The museum also looks at the issue of genocide as a whole, displaying exhibitions about other atrocities around the world. On average, a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum takes between 2 and 3 hours.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is a museum and a memorial of the Holocaust, in which over six million Jews, and at least five million from other ethnic groups, were murdered in an act of genocide perpetrated by the German National Socialist Party under Adolph Hitler. Through exhibits including photographs, victims’ accounts, art installations and information panels, Yad Vashem offers a moving – and harrowing – account of the events of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is an installation commemorating the genocide of the Jewish people perpetrated under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Memorial is a monument to the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust. Made up of a vast dark granite maze and a subterranean information centre which has details about the victims, the memorial is a moving site.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was used by the Nazis between 1936 and 1945. Its primary function was for the imprisonment and execution – or extermination – of Jews and political dissidents, including many Dutch freedom fighters, Russian prisoners of war and even some political leaders from invaded countries. Its prime location near Berlin ensured that SACHSENHAUSEN was an important camp and it served as a template for other concentration camps. Estimates put the number of SACHSENHAUSEN casualties at between 30,000 and 35,000, many of whom were shot, hung or exterminated in a specially built room in its infirmary.

The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the Nazis to forcibly house the city’s Jewish population, with up to 400,000 people confined here from October 1940. In 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place, a dramatic rebellion which occurred when the Nazis attempted to liquidate the ghetto and one which saw it razed to the ground. Very little of the Warsaw Ghetto survives today. There are fragments of the original ghetto wall and several memorials including the Mila 18 monument where the uprising headquarters were located and an inscription where insurgent leader Mordechaj Anielewicz and the last of the uprising fighters perished. There is also the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Monument and a monument at Umschlagplatz, the site from where Jews were transported to the death camps.