To support students visiting IWM’s new galleries to learn about the Holocaust, IWM has developed a new Holocaust learning programme. 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.

BBC - Commemorating the Holocaust BBC - Commemorating the Holocaust

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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Episode 2 – Yearning to Breathe Free (1938-1942) After Kristallnacht, Germany’s Jews are desperate to escape Hitler’s tyranny. Americans are united in their disapproval of the Nazis’ brutality, but remain divided on whether and even how to act as World War II begins. Charles Lindbergh speaks for isolationists, while FDR tries to support Europe’s democracies. The Nazis invade the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust begins in secret. Say the word ‘Holocaust’ and for most of us, the image that comes to mind is of death camps like Auschwitz; the enduring symbols of a highly organised machine of industrialised genocide. But few of us realise that the death camps were just the final act of the Holocaust. This film tells the story of what went before.

People who are aware of the language used by the Nazis to dehumanise vulnerable minorities are rightly sensitive about seeing similar terms and divisions being encouraged and normalised in current contexts.

World War and The Holocaust Preview of IWM’s new Second World War and The Holocaust

James Bulgin (Image: BBC/Caravan Media/Benjamin Holgate) By showing these documentaries, we hope to shine a light on history’s darkest days and ensure that the stories of those whose lives were lost in the Holocaust are never forgotten. — Kate Phillips, Director of UnscriptedUncovering this story is historian James Bulgin. James created the Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum; now he examines a chapter of the Holocaust that has been left largely unexplored for more than 80 years. Democracy is a very fragile thing’ says Holocaust survivor at launch of Imperial War Museum exhibition 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. 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.

Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone

Among several objects on display in the Second World War and The Holocaust Galleries are Eva Wohl's last exchange of Red Cross telegrams with her father. Leonard and Clara sadly did not move across to Britain to be with their daughters and were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz in 1943. 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.As a second-generation inheritor of my family’s Holocaust legacy, I firmly believe that racism grows where racism is enabled. The enablers can be active, or by virtue of apathy and indifference, passively looking away. Human beings might never rid themselves entirely of prejudice, being of itself a distortion of our own nature, but Bulgin touches on something fundamental: never to take for granted that our common humanity can only be preserved by us all challenging the very tolerance of hatred, as well as facing down the hatred itself. Gena Turgel was liberated from Belsen Concentration Camp on 15 April 1945. On the second day following her liberation she met Sergeant Norman Turgel who was serving with 53 FS Section, Intelligence Corps attached to 8th Corps.

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

My mother and her sister are child Holocaust survivors. Not a day goes by that doesn’t involve Holocaust remembrance in some form, casting a long shadow across her life and a ripple through the generations of her family. Her father was murdered in a slave labour camp near Lviv in 1942, a memory too painful for her own mother to talk about after the war, though her postwar diary recalls his last days with agony and lament. She and her two girls survived in hiding, both because of and despite the actions of ordinary strangers around her.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.