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TRAVELING EXHIBITIONS
The traveling exhibitions program extends the Museum’s walls to bring Holocaust education communities across the country. Since 1991, eight different exhibitions have traveled to 108 cities and communities in 37 states and to Canada. Current traveling exhibitions:
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Jews and the murder and persecution of millions of others was founded upon the conviction that “inferior” races and individuals must be eliminated from German society so that the “fittest Aryans” could thrive. The Nazi state fully committed itself to implementing a uniquely racist and antisemitic variation of eugenic thought to “scientifically” build what it considered to be a “superior race.” Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race examines how the Nazi leadership, in collaboration with individuals in professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good, used science to help legitimize persecution, murder and, ultimately, genocide.
Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings
Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany, and a full six years before World War II, German university students launched an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” targeting authors ranging from Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Their orchestrated book burnings across Germany would come to underscore German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine’s 19th century warning, “where one burns books, one soon burns people.” Fighting the Fires of Hate provides a vivid look at the first steps the Nazis took to suppress freedom of expression, and the strong response that occurred in the United States both immediately and in the years thereafter. The exhibition focuses on how the book burnings became a potent symbol during World War II in America’s battle against Nazism and concludes by examining their continued impact on our public discourse. The exhibition began traveling in 2004.
THE NAZI OLYMPICS Berlin 1936
Highlighting the political controversy surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the exhibition explores topics such as the Nazification of German sport, the subsequent exclusion of Jews and other “non-Aryans” from German athletic associations and competition, the failed effort of a proposed U.S. boycott of the Olympics, and the unparalleled victories of African-American athletes in the 1936 Games.
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945
Thousands of homosexuals, primarily gay men, were murdered in concentration camps by the Nazis along with millions of Jews and other victims including, Roma (Gypsies), Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the handicapped during World War II and the Holocaust. The exhibition explores why homosexual behavior was identified as a danger to Nazi society and how the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate it. The exhibition began traveling in 2003.
Schindler
This exhibition examines the life and actions of Oskar Schindler, the ethnic German and Nazi party member who has come to personify those heroic individuals who risked their lives to rescue Jews and others from the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. It began traveling in 2002.
Varian Fry, ASSIGNMENT: RESCUE, 1940 – 1941
This exhibition tells the story of Varian Fry’s efforts on behalf of the American-based Emergency Rescue Committee to rescue Jewish intellectuals, politicians and artists trapped in Vichy France. Fry and his associates, in spite of obstructionist American and French governments, helped nearly 2,200 people escape Nazi Europe. Visitors follow Fry’s tracks from New York to Marseilles until his expulsion from France in 1941. It has traveled to dozens of institutions across the country.
For further information, contact the Media Relations Office at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Andy Hollinger (202) 488-6133.
