Kripo warrant badge

Official identification tag (warrant badge) used by the State Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei or Kripo), after Heinrich Himmler centralized the police forces in the 1930s. These badges were generally suspended from a chain and included the individual officer's number on the reverse.

The German Order Police in Poland

German Order Policemen perpetrated many aspects of the Holocaust. During World War II, they were deployed to areas of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany. In Poland, the Order Police engaged in the Nazi regime's persecution of Jews and Poles.  

Hitler Youth

View artifacts and photographs and listen to testimony excerpts about the Hitler Youth. 

Liberation of Mauthausen camp and subcamps

Photographs and film footage illustrating the liberation of Mauthausen and two of its subcamps, Gusen and Ebensee. 

Forced labor in the Mauthausen camp system

Photographs and testimony describing forced labor in the Mauthausen camp system. 

Julien Bryan: Photographs and Film

Explore images and film by US filmmaker and photographer Julien Bryan, including documentation of Warsaw following the German invasion of Poland.

Ponary

The German army occupied Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, on June 24, 1941. The following month, German Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian auxiliaries murdered thousands of Jewish residents of Vilna at a killing site in the Ponary (Paneriai) Forest, southwest of Vilna. By the end of 1941, Einsatzgruppen had killed about 40,000 Jews in Ponary. By July 1944, perhaps as many as 75,000 people had been killed at the site, the vast majority of them Jews. These photographs and narratives shed light on the Vilna…

Vilna - Maps

Killing sites

Abraham Malnik, Steven Springfield, and Rochelle Slivka describe killing sites at Fort IX, Rumbula, and Ponary. 

Geography of the Holocaust

The Holocaust (1933–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II.  The Holocaust was a German initiative that took place throughout German- and Axis-controlled Europe. It affected nearly all of Europe’s Jewish…