Creation of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial
At the end of September 1945, the British military government ordered that a suitable memorial should be established in Bergen-Belsen. The plans for the site at the time called for a cemetery-like complex which only incorporated the area around the mass graves.
Inauguration of the Memorial
An international commission was formed which included survivors. In the summer of 1946, this commission recommended that an obelisk and an inscription wall be erected. The resulting memorial was inaugurated in November 1952 with a state ceremony which attracted international attention. Responsibility for the memorial was handed over to the federal state of Lower Saxony, making Bergen-Belsen the oldest state-run memorial in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Over the course of the 1950s, Bergen-Belsen was increasingly forgotten as a site of remembrance. But against the backdrop of a wave of antisemitic vandalism at the end of 1959 and the high-profile trials of Adolf Eichmann and the guards from Auschwitz, Germany began talking more about its past. In connection with this, the first scholarly work was published on the history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. State funding made it possible to add a Document Building and exhibition to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and to redesign the grounds.
Professionalization of the Memorial’s work
Even after the Document Building opened in 1966, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial had no permanent research or educational staff for a long time. Two decades later, this situation had become incompatible with the demands of comprehensive remembrance work at the sites of National Socialist crimes. In 1985, the Lower Saxony State Parliament unanimously voted to expand the Document Building and establish visitor services at the site. In April 1990, a new permanent exhibition opened in the much larger Document Building. This exhibition was the first to include the history of the POW camp. Permanent research staff were hired starting in 1987, seminar rooms were set up, and tours were offered, enabling the Bergen-Belsen Memorial to finally meet the requirements for sustainable remembrance work.
Following years of archival research worldwide and the significant expansion of the Memorial’s collection of historical documents and artefacts, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial opened a new Documentation Centre in 2007 with a permanent exhibition, archive, and library. The external grounds were also subsequently redesigned to include a visitor guidance system with information pillars and bookmarks to explain the history of the site.
In 2019, a group of five historical buildings were partitioned off from the nearby barracks to become part of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. The building known as M.B. 89 is now a learning centre which also features an exhibition on the local activities of the Wehrmacht from the creation of the military training ground to the end of the Second World War in Europe.