A new exhibition at Bonn’s Bundeskunsthalle is examining how Germany remembers Nazi crimes as Holocaust survivors grow older and acts of disrespect at memorial sites become more frequent, according to curator Jens-Christian Wagner. The exhibition, “NEVER AGAIN! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime,” is scheduled to run through May 2, 2027, the Bundeskunsthalle says.
Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, said young visitors have posed for photographs inside a crematorium oven at Buchenwald while giving Nazi salutes. He also cited memorial trees planted in honor of concentration camp victims being cut down. Such incidents, he told DW, have become more frequent in recent years.
The exhibition combines art and historical objects with testimony. Its curators hope to encourage visitors to explore the history rather than rely on moralizing, Wagner said. At Buchenwald, students take part in full-day programs that involve examining historical sources. The aim is to help them draw their own conclusions and consider how patterns of exclusion can connect the Nazi era with present-day debates.
Survivor testimony at the center
Eva Umlauf, an exhibition patron and president of the International Auschwitz Committee since 2025, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her parents in November 1944, when she was two years old. She survived, but her father and other relatives were murdered. Her arm bears the camp number A26959.
Umlauf has said she does not hate Germans but cannot forgive the deaths of six million Jews. She began speaking publicly about her childhood in 2011 and has since shared her experience with students and other audiences. She told DW that requests to visit schools are numerous, but that the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party leaves her worried about how many young people she can reach.
In a message to young people printed in the exhibition catalog, Umlauf said they are not responsible for the crimes of earlier generations, but are responsible for the future. She urged them to help build a country where people can grow up safely regardless of background, faith or skin color.
Reid Bentley