News

Educators from the Auschwitz Museum and other memorials in Poland had a chance to examine the German perspective on commemorating the victims of Nazism. As part of the Tracks Project, they spent a week as invited guests at the Documentation Center in Nuremberg, which is located in the historic Congress Hall on the grounds where party rallies were held under the Third Reich.

The German government will contribute €120,000 to cover the cost of running the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation office in 2010 under an agreement signed in Warsaw by the Michael H. Gerdts, the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, president of the Foundation Management Board.

For the exhibit “The Track. Logistics of Racial Mania” (May 19 – October 31, 2010) a permanent live internet connection has been installed between Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Documentation Centre on the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg. This place of genocide is linked to the place where the Racial Laws where proclaimed in 1935.

In the name of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the head of the Research Department, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, laid a wreath at the Death Wall to mark the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Nazi Concentration Camps. On this day seventy years ago, the Nazi Germans deported 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów to the newly founded Auschwitz camp.

A new exhibition in block 15 at the Auschwitz I site will present the fate of more than 450,000 Polish citizens—Poles and Polish Jews—deported to the Auschwitz Nazi German concentration camp and extermination center.

Pledges to the Perpetual Fund created by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation already amount to €67 million. This is more than half the amount needed to ensure the financing of the long-term conservation plan for the grounds of the Memorial. The Foundation Council met for the second time at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister in Warsaw to discuss plans for the immediate future, introduce needed changes to its statute, and pass a motion on the guidelines for investing the assets of the Fund.