From 7 July to 27 August 2023, the Nordhausen City Museum Flohburg is showing the exhibition "From Auschwitz to the Harz Mountains. Sinti and Roma in Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp". The exhibition will be opened on Thursday, 6 July, from 7 pm, with an introduction by Anett Dremel, provisional director of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial.
The exhibition was conceived in 2012 by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation and is being shown again for the first time in Nordhausen.
The exhibition is dedicated to a topic long neglected in German society and remembrance culture: the persecution, deportation and murder of thousands of Sinti and Roma in National Socialist Germany and their continuing discrimination after 1945 until today. The exhibition focuses on the beginnings of the social exclusion of Sinti and Roma before 1933, their horrific everyday life in the concentration camps Auschwitz and Mittelbau-Dora, and the long and often futile struggle of concentration camp survivors for social recognition after 1945.
In the so-called "Auschwitz-Erlass" ("Auschwitz-Decree"), Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Sinti and Roma living in the German Reich to Auschwitz in December 1942. In Auschwitz thousands were murdered in the gas chambers. Only about 3000 men and women survived the "Gypsy family camp" there, which the SS disbanded in August 1944. Almost all male survivors were taken to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which thus became the central detention centre for Sinti and Roma throughout Germany.
The exhibition will be opened in the Green Salon of the Flohburg on Thursday, 6 July, at 7 pm. Anett Dremel, provisional director of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial, will give an introduction to the exhibition and the history of the Sinti and Roma in Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Admission to the exhibition opening is free.
