News

In 2011, there were 1,405,000 visitors to the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz. This is a record figure in the more than sixty years of the Memorial, which in 2012 will have been functioning for 65 years. What is important, the number of young people who visited the Site grew significantly – in 2011 they were more than a million, that is more than 150,000 than the year before.

Documents showing how the Nazi Germans planned to expand the Auschwitz I concentration camp can be viewed in a new temporary exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

The main ceremony to mark the sixty-seventh anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners of the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp will be held on Friday, January 27. President Bronisław Komorowski of the Republic of Poland has extended his official patronage over the event.

In a special letter addressed to Simone Veil, the former Auschwitz prisoner and honorary chair of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, French Prime Minister François Fillon has announced that his country will support the creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation Perpetual Fund to the amount of €5 million. The sum will be paid over five years beginning in 2012.

The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust organized the second round of workshops, December 12th to the 13th, 2012, for tour guides and museum educators from across Poland at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

The European Commission has assigned €4 million to support the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum within the framework of the Auschwitz—Preserving Authenticity—Nine Tasks for the Years 2012-2015 project. The funds come from the Europe for Citizens program. The contract was signed by Museum Director Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński and the European Commission General Director for Social Communication, Jean Pierre Vandersteen.