Auschwitz museum’s artifacts to go on international tour

Reminders of the Nazi regime's "biggest crime of the 20th century" go on tour for first time.

Each year more than 2 million people visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Oświęcim, Poland. The museum is located at the scene of the concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the Nazi regime, where 1.1 million were killed during World War II.

Among the museum’s collection are powerful reminders of the atrocities suffered by the camp’s mostly Jewish victims: mounds of hair and shoes and personal items relinquished upon their arrival.

Now, for the first time, Smithsonian Magazine reports, the museum, will make an international tour with more than 600 of its original artifacts to allow those who don’t have a chance to travel to Poland to see the exhibits in person.

The exhibition will include an original German-made Model 2 freight wagon used for the transport of soldiers, prisoners-of war, and for the deportation of Jews to the ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Poland. Other items will portray the lives of the victims as well as the perpetrators of, in the words of the the museum’s director, Piotr M.A. Cywiński​,“the biggest crime of the 20th century.”

Cywiński​ says in a press release, “Nothing can replace a visit to the authentic site of the biggest crime of the 20th century, but this exhibition, which people in many countries will have the opportunity to see, can become a great warning cry for us all against building the future on hatred, racism, anti-Semitism and bottomless contempt for another human being.”

The exhibition will begin this December in Madrid and travel to seven European and seven North American cities.