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August 2007

July 2007

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May 2007

March 2007

January 2007

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December 2006

October 2006

The photos showing construction work going on at the new exhibition building can be published free of charge. Please ask for them:

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Redesigning the Bergen-Belsen Memorial


In 1998 the German Bundestag approved the Final Report of the Select Committee on German Unity. This provided a political consensus on the basic tasks of concentration camp memorials in the German cultural memory. There are three main tasks:

• maintaining the memory of the victims
• carrying out documentation and research
• providing education and information

Increased research is now being carried out on the history of the concentration camp as a result of funding by the Federal Government, wich has been granted to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and to other concentration camp memorials of international importance since the year 2000.

The history of Bergen-Belsen is to be told in the new Document Centre:

• the simultaneous existence of the concentration camp and a prisoner of war camp at one location
  
  
• the mass death in a concentration camp, which, when it was established cynically gave hope to several thousand Jews that they would be saved from systematic genocide
  
  
• the establishment of a camp for survivors of the concentration camps (DP camp) directly beside a former concentration camp
  
  

More than 60 years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – after a long phase of suppression and destruction of the memory at the historical site – Bergen-Belsen is, through these measures, to take up a firm position in this process of memory-forming.

The following PDF document contains further information about redesigning the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and the new Document Centre.

• Redesign.pdf (~ 105 KB)