Second Floor: No passes are required.
Gain an insider’s view of history, access Museum resources, and contemplate the connections to today’s world by visiting the new Wexner Center. Explore “The Nuremberg Trials: What is Justice?”; view the Committee on Conscience display “Who will survive today? Genocide Emergency: Darfur, Sudan”; and visit the Survivors Registry.
“There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.”
—Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg
The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime—millions of murders, wrongful imprisonments, and tortures; rape, theft, and destruction. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the world was faced with a challenge—how to seek justice for an almost unimaginable scale of criminal behavior. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) held at Nuremberg, Germany, attempted to broach this immense challenge on a legal basis.
The Holocaust was, in the legal language of the IMT, “a crime against humanity.” Convened within months of the end of the war, from November 20, 1945, until the verdicts were delivered on October 1, 1946, the tribunal at Nuremberg set precedents: in international law, in documentation of the historical record—in seeking some beginning, however inadequate, in a search for justice. Trace the legacy of the International Military Tribunal in this interactive display of film, photos, and oral history.
Discover the fates of Holocaust survivors and learn about their lost communities, through personalized searches in the Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors.
The Committee on Conscience (CoC) of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has declared a Genocide Emergency for the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa’s largest country. The Emergency was declared because acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity are occurring or immediately threatened in Sudan. Tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered and thousands of women raped. Over 1.5 million have been driven from their homes, their villages torched and their property stolen by the Sudanese government and allied militias. The death toll exceeds 100,000 and may be more than 400,000. And the crisis continues—the lives of hundreds of thousands more hang in the balance today.
The victims are targeted because of their ethnic and perceived racial identity.
Explore Museum resources and learn more about the emergency taking place right now in Sudan.
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The mandate of the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is to alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity.
