IWM’s Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Programme (SWWHPP) was established to collaborate with cultural partners across the UK and engage new audiences in projects which explore local Second World War and Holocaust collections and themes within the national context. A 783kg V-1 flying bomb is suspended between the two new galleries, presenting a striking symbol of how the Holocaust and the Second World War are interconnected. 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.

James Bulgin | The Guardian

The new galleries explore three core themes of persecution, looking at the global situation at the end of the First World War; escalation, identifying how violence towards Jewish people and communities developed through the 1930s; and annihilation, examining how Nazi policy crosses the threshold into wide-scale state-sponsored murder in the heart of twentieth century Europe.To support students visiting IWM’s new galleries to learn about the Holocaust, IWM has developed a new Holocaust learning programme. 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. On 14 December 1938 Leonhard and Clara Wohl, Jewish couple originally from Northern Germany, sent their two younger daughters, Eva and Ulli, to Britain on a Kindertransport. 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.

Holocaust | Imperial War Museums A personal story from the Holocaust | Imperial War Museums

The emphasis will be on the contemporary, with testimonies only from the time, to illustrate how events were perceived as they unfolded. The word Holocaust is not used, as it was applied post-genocide. Episode 3 – The Homeless, Tempest- Tossed (1942-) The first reports of the killing reach the United States. A group of dedicated government officials establish the War Refugee Board to finance and support rescue operations. As the Allies advance, soldiers uncover mass graves and liberate German concentration camps, revealing the sheer scale and horror of the Holocaust. The danger of its reverberations soon become apparent. Visitors to the galleries don’t meet Anita again until much later, when her experiences of Auschwitz-Birkenau are told in the section about slave labour in concentration camps. Anita’s story is told through her red jumper. Students that chose Anita’s story in the first room of the galleries are directed to find her jumper. They learn that Anita was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 18, where she was recruited into the women’s orchestra at the camp as the cellist. She was forced to play upbeat marches as prisoners walked in procession to and from work and for the SS. Anita’s role in the orchestra meant that she was given extra bread. She exchanged some of this bread for the jumper now on display and wore it both day and night to protect herself against the harsh winter – hidden underneath her camp uniform. She continued to wear it in Bergen-Belsen from where she was liberated in April 1945. 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). Personal stories are at the heart of the new The Holocaust Galleries, along with a breadth of objects and original material that help audiences consider the cause, course and consequences of this terrible period in world history. Individual stories from some of the six million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust are told through over 2000 photos, books, artworks and letters, and personal objects ranging from jewellery and clothing to toys and musical instrumentsTo support visitors wanting to delve deeper into the content and themes of IWM’s new galleries, and to further develop their understanding of the Second World War and the Holocaust, IWM is releasing two new publications in October 2021.

Episode - BBC Programme Index

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. Clare Lawlor, from IWM’s Public Engagement and Learning team, shares the story of a red jumper that makes up part of the new Holocaust Galleries at IWM London. She explains what this simple artefact can tell us about a young woman’s experiences during the Holocaust. Taking a robust view of perpetrators, it will say: “The men – and women – who did this, they weren’t unaware of what they were doing,” said the lead historian on the project, James Bulgin. A new Imperial War Museums gallery will challenge visitors to “beware the Holocaust because you could have been a perpetrator”. 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”.

My mother was amazed after the war when her cousin gave her this postcard that her sister even knew the word because I don’t come from an observant family,” Mrs Clarke told the JC. “But goodness knows what one can dredge up from the subconscious if you have to. They may have common elements but each story is unique.”

What Was The Holocaust? - Holocaust History | IWM What Was The Holocaust? - Holocaust History | IWM

First broadcast: Mon 23 rd Jan 2023, 21:00on BBC Two England Latest broadcast: Fri 27 th Jan 2023, 23:05on BBC Two Wales HD The Holocaust has become defined by centralised “tropes” – Auschwitz, trains, people being selected left and right on ramps, anonymous piles of shoes. Yet the majority of those murdered weren’t selected like that, except at Auschwitz. It happened because of European rail networks, collaboration between different people and organisations and businesses across Europe working together, Bulgin added.

The V-1 bomb that will occupy a space between the new Holocaust gallery and second world war exhibition. Photograph: Andrew Tunnard/IWM It is the story of the first defining act of the greatest crime in history, a holocaust of bullets that preceded the holocaust of gas. Millions of victims - men, women and children – were shot and buried in thousands of trenches and ditches in fields and forests across eastern Europe; often unrecorded and uncounted. Democracy is a very fragile thing’ says Holocaust survivor at launch of Imperial War Museum exhibition In How the Holocaust Began on BBC Two and iPlayer, historian James Bulgin uncovers the lost origins of the Holocaust following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, exploring the mass shootings, collaboration and experimentation that led to the Final Solution.