News

A new plaque has been added to the Monument to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Victims at the site of the Birkenau camp. It was placed where the plaque in English (now moved to the far side of the monument) used to be. The language on the new plaque is the traditional language of Sephardic Jews.

On October 4, 2002, the Museum archives were enriched by a copy of 200 volumes of records from the Criminal Case against Mulka et al. Twenty-four persons accused of committing crimes in Auschwitz, including Robert Mulka, the former adjutant to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, went on trial in Frankfurt am Main in 1963. Six of the defendants were sentenced to the most severe penalty available under German Federal Republic law—life imprisonment—and the others were sentenced to prison sentences ranging from three to fourteen years.

A book launch for Księga Pamięci. Transporty Polaków do KL Auschwitz z Krakowa i innych miejscowości Polski południowej w l. 1940-1944 [Memorial Book: Transports of Poles to Auschwitz Concentration Camp from Cracow and Other Localities in Southern Poland from 1940 to 1944] was held in the gallery of nineteenth-century Polish art at the Cloth Hall in Cracow.

Auschwitz Prisoner Labor: The Organization and Exploitation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoners as Laborers (the English version of Zatrudnienie więźniów KL Auschwitz. Organizacja pracy i metody eksploatacji siły roboczej) by Franciszek Piper, the head of the Historical Research Department at the Museum, has been published.

The Polish National Bank has presented the Museum with 20,000 zloty for the purchase of one hundred paintings and prints by former Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoner Halina Ołomucka.

August 2 marked the 58th anniversary of the "liquidation" of the so-called "Gypsy family camp" in Birkenau. The last Roma left alive there—almost 3,000 men, women, and children—were murdered in the gas chambers. The Zigeunerlager [Gypsy camp] was founded in February 1943 on orders from Himmler, who ordered the deportation of the Roma who had not yet been expelled from the German Reich, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.