This striped cap was part of a concentration camp prisoner uniform. It belonged to Karel Bruml.
Bruml was a Czech Jewish man who was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto in December 1941. From there, he was deported to Auschwitz in October 1942. At Auschwitz, Bruml was registered as a prisoner in the camp and given a prisoner number and uniform. He was transferred within the Auschwitz camp complex to Auschwitz-Monowitz (also called Auschwitz III or Buna). He remained in Auschwitz for more than two years until the camp's evacuation in January 1945. Bruml survived a death march and several other concentration camps.
Item View
Set of tefillin in an embroidered bag. Tefillin are ritual objects worn by religious Jews during weekday morning prayers. This set was found on the body of a death march victim, who was buried near Regensburg, Germany.
Item View
This taffeta and cotton skirt dates from the 1920s. It belonged to a Romani (Gypsy) woman who was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and who lived in Germany before the war. She was arrested by the Nazis and interned in the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen camps. She died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, shortly before the camp's liberation. Her husband and two of her six children were also killed in the camps.
Item View
This casting of a gas chamber door in the Majdanek camp, near Lublin, Poland, was commissioned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Each gas chamber in Majdanek was fitted with an airtight metal door and was bolted shut before gas entered the chamber inside. SS guards could observe the killing process through peepholes in the upper center of the door.
Item View
This photograph shows some of the 190 granite blocks donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by the Mauthausen Public Memorial in Austria. The Nazis established the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1938 near an abandoned stone quarry. Prisoners were forced to carry these granite blocks up more than 180 steps. The small blocks weighed between 30 and 45 pounds each. The larger blocks could each weigh more than 75 pounds. Prisoners assigned to forced labor in the camp quarry were quickly worked to death.
Item View
Yona Wygocka Dickmann fashioned this jackknife from aluminum and part of a saw after the SS transferred her from Auschwitz to forced labor at an airplane factory in Freiburg, Germany, in November 1944. She used the knife to extend her daily ration of bread by cutting it in half.
Item View
Hana Mueller altered this skirt issued to her in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 by using the hem to make pockets.
Item View
A blue and gray striped jacket from the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The letter "P" on the left front of the jacket indicates that it was worn by a Polish, non-Jewish prisoner. "P" stands for "Pole" in German. The jacket was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by the prisoner who wore it, Julian Noga.
Item View
Abraham Lewent, who had been sent from the Warsaw ghetto to Majdanek and later transferred to several concentration camps in Germany, wore this jacket as part of the uniform issued to him upon his arrival in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.
Item View
Authorities in Berlin, Germany, sent this notice to Barbara Wohlfahrt, informing her of her husband Gregor's execution on the morning of December 7, 1939. Although he was physically unfit to serve in the armed forces, the Nazis tried Wohlfahrt for his religious opposition to military service. As a Jehovah's Witness, Wohlfahrt believed that military service violated the biblical commandment not to kill. On November 8, 1939, a military court condemned Wohlfahrt to beheading, a sentence carried out one month later in Ploetzensee prison in Berlin.
Item View
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, EVZ, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of donor acknowledgement.
