Overview

Auschwitz becomes a museum and a memorial site

June 14, 1947 Oświęcim

On 14 June 1947, a museum opened on the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp. Several buildings across the campgrounds provide information about life in the camp. The museum pays ample attention to the more than one million people who died in the camp. Large piles of suitcases, shoes, glasses, and other belongings of murdered Jews can be seen here. In the first year, the museum welcomed 170,000 visitors. Nowadays, it receives over two million visitors a year.

In the 1960s, the museum was expanded with national exhibitions. They focused on the persecution of the Jews in various European countries.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the second location of the camp, a memorial was erected in 1967. On this large site, the prisoner barracks, other buildings, and ruins of the gas chambers still remain.