English
Polish
Holocaust Laboratory – New Historical Exhibition at the Former Kulmhof Death Center in Chełmno nad Nerem
Zofia Wóycicka
woycicka@dhi.waw.pl Biohistorian, museum curator, works at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Studied at Warsaw University and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, alumnus of doctoral studies at the Graduate School for Social Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Worked at the Education Center of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and as a curator at the House of European History in Brussels (2011–2015), and subsequently as a researcher at the Historical Studies Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin (2015–2019). Main areas of research interest: memory studies, museum studies, particularly ways of presenting the histroy of World War II. Author of, among others: Przerwana żałoba. Polskie spory wokół pamięci nazistowskich obozów koncentracyjnych i zagłady, 1944–1950 (2009). Her latest publication: “Cultural Diplomacy in the War Museum: The Case of the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst” (with David Clarke, History and Memory 2019, vol. 31 no. 2)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9461-2387
German Historical Institute in Warsaw
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 16 (2020), pages: 747-758
Publication date: 2020-12-15
Abstract
Kulmhof in Chełmno nad Nerem was the first Nazi death center in occupied Europe and one that operated the longest. It became the site of the extermination of Jews from the territories incorporated into the Reich, including the Łódź ghetto and other countries in Europe. That place had been forgotten for a long time. It was only in December 2019 that a new permanent historical exhibition was opened at the former death center in Chełmno nad Nerem. The terrain was cleaned up and marked. Excavations conducted over the last several decades in both Chełmno nad Nerem and the nearby Rzuchów Forest have facilitated a more precise recreation of the topography of the crime and have unearthed a number of precious personal effects of the murdered. Despite or perhaps owing to this modest form of commemoration this place’s unique character has been highlighted. It was neither a concentration camp like those in Dachau or Buchenwald, where the architecture constituted a bold expression of the Nazi ideology, nor a ‘factory of death’ – a site of industrialized mass murder like Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a grange in the countryside hastily transformed into a mass extermination center
Keywords
Kulmhof, Chełmno nad Nerem, death camp, museum, commemoration
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