Holocaust

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Historian James Bulgin, who created the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, investigates a story left unexplored for over 80 years. During the Second World War, millions of men, women and children were shot and buried by the Nazis in thousands of trenches and ditches, dug in fields and forests across eastern Europe. This was often unrecorded and uncounted, and the victims lost to history. Democracy is a very fragile thing’ says Holocaust survivor at launch of Imperial War Museum exhibition In many other respects they were relatively normal; they had kids, social lives, did the things we all do. And they also killed people. It wasn’t a machine that killed people, which is what Holocaust galleries and representation have tended to suggest.”

Imperial War Museum galleries show where innocence ended New Imperial War Museum galleries show where innocence ended

Mr Bulgin reported that many survivors were consulted during the research. “If a survivor wants to talk to me, I will go anywhere,” he said.

Objects loaned from institutions across the world will include a V-1 flying bomb – or doodlebug – that will occupy a space between the Holocaust gallery and the second world war gallery. Other artefacts include the birth certificate of Eva Clarke, who miraculously survived after being born in Mauthausen camp in Austria days before liberation.

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On entering the new Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London (IWM), visitors will see a 1942 quote from Nachum Grzywacz. A new Imperial War Museums gallery will challenge visitors to “beware the Holocaust because you could have been a perpetrator”. In one of innumerable chilling insights into the Nazi mindset, on show is the callous Juden Raus (Jews Out), promoted as a “thoroughly enjoyable party game”, whose goal was to round up Jews for deportation to Palestine. Uncovering this story is historian James Bulgin. James created the Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum; now he examines a chapter of the Holocaust that has been left largely unexplored for more than 80 years. On 20 October 2021, IWM London’s new Second World War and The Holocaust Galleries opened to the public. Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch had heard our plans for the galleries and allowed us to copy dozens of her photographs showing her family life before the war. She had also told us how she wished her jumper to be displayed: ‘with the sleeves showing; the sleeves must be shown.’

What should we consider when using images in our teaching of the Holocaust?

This was was one of the most successful Russian artillery pieces of the Second World War. This object helps tell the story of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union and emphasises the industrial miracle that enabled the Soviet Union to drive out the invaders. Defeats in 1941 had deprived the Soviet Union of 40% of its coal and steel and 32% of its industrial workforce. Through testimonies and artefacts, it would aim to take victims out of victimhood, Bulgin added, to see them as “people who were born, who were living their lives, and the interruption of those lives shouldn’t be the only thing that defines them”.

BBC Two - How the Holocaust Began

The Holocaust areas alone contain some 2,000 objects and 4,000 images. Mr Bulgin said the museum team had wanted to accurately depict “the massive diversity and plurality of Jewish life pre-war”. And also to show what it means to be persecuted — and to persecute — and to demonstrate that the Nazi atrocities were “done by people to people”.The V-1 bomb that will occupy a space between the new Holocaust gallery and second world war exhibition. Photograph: Andrew Tunnard/IWM Charlie English’s book The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, which follows the stories of artists in asylums studied by Hans Prinzhorn, suggests that the fusion of Hitler’s attitudes to disability and art (particularly artists’ explorations of insanity in the 1920s and 30s, which were prompted by Prinzhorn’s study) was an essential feature of his grotesque vision for Germany that led to the programmes of murder and genocide. The galleries – due to open in the autumn and with a fundraising appeal still running – will be brightly lit. Most such exhibitions are dimly lit because the subject is dark. “But that suggests it happened in the shadows, that nobody really knew about it, and the only way we can response to it is through silence. We think that is problematic. Because it happened in daylight, and it happened over a vast, vast landscape,” Bulgin added.

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While the Holocaust has attracted a great amount of historical and scholarly attention, with about 4,000 new books a year, the temptation had been to “push it to the margins”, to think of it in isolation and separate from what was going on elsewhere, he said. Kristallnacht is instead referred to as “the November pogrom”, Mr Bulgin stressing the importance of conveying that it was about more than shattered windows and the destruction of synagogues. But the vast majority of the people responsible for these things were infinitely more ordinary and more normal than that.” To support students visiting IWM’s new galleries to learn about the Holocaust, IWM has developed a new Holocaust learning programme.James Bulgin tells an important story that highlights how, to many people, the above placenames might sound unfamiliar, as Auschwitz fills Holocaust consciousness for the sheer scale of its horror ( Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone – ordinary people were active participants, 27 January). But in truth, all sense of scale is lost when imagining the implications of the Nazis’ genocidal politics, while the human psyche is overwhelmed by the implication of such murderous intent to humanity itself. More importantly, he correctly emphasises that evil can, under particular circumstances, look very much like any one of us. This is, as Hannah Arendt describes, the sheer “banality of evil”. The BBC is showing three new documentaries this month to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January. There is deliberately no indication of what became of the author (head of content James Bulgin tells the JC that Grzywacz died during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising).