The Imperial War Museum's Holocaust collections

The Museum's collecting departments preserve documents, artefacts, film photographs and other material for posterity. If you have historical material which you think may be of interest to the Museum, please get in touch with the Department of Holocaust and Genocide History on 0207 416 5286.

Recent acquisitions include

A burnt Torah scroll found by British troops shortly after the liberation of Bergen Belsen on 15 April 1945, which had been abandoned in a disused school house near Hanover. 

   Unclaimed items of jewellery deposited in Barclays Bank in 1939 by a Bratislavan Jew in an effort to save his belongings from Nazi confiscation.  Lent by the Department of Trade and Industry, whose Enemy Property Compensation Scheme ran from 1999 to 2004.

Opera glasses given to a prisoner in Terezin upon her liberation from the camp by a Russian officer, engraved in Russian with the date ‘May 1945’ 

Seven lithographs of Buchenwald camp in 1945 by Dutch painter and camp inmate Henri Pieck

Danish version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf

Almost complete collection of correspondence between two Kindertransport children and their parents, covering the period 1939 to 1942. A very rich collection, which shows both the parents’ (unsuccessful) attempts to escape Nazi-controlled Slovakia, and the children’s period of adjustment to life in Britain.

Claims Conference electronic memoirs project

Survivors of the Holocaust around the world are being asked to submit previously unpublished or unavailable memoirs of their wartime experiences to a new electronic collection being established by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).  Further details: www.claimscon.org