Next-door to the Bureau is a unique building, opened in 1993, which draws visitors from all over the world. It is the sobering U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A Museum Dedicated to Mass Murder and Survival

The name Holocaust comes from a Greek word used in the Bible that means a complete burnt offering. (Hebrews 10:6) However, in relation to this museum, “the Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.” Jews were the primary victims, but the State policy also sought to eliminate Roma and Sinti (two gypsy tribes), the disabled, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political dissidents.

The first impression you get as you walk into the building is hardly that of a warm welcome. Nazi concentration camps were designed to intimidate. The museum echoes that feeling. What you see around you is a towering, cold, impersonal steel-and-brick industrial structure. From the Hall of Witness on the first floor, you can see up to the steel-and-glass roof over the third floor. The view through the skylight, as described in an official brochure, “is warped, deformed, and eccentrically pitched.” The architect set out to create an atmosphere in which the visitor feels that “something is amiss here.”

The museum has five floors, but the main touring area for the public extends from the fourth floor down to the second, and it is suggested that you start your tour on the fourth floor. The tour is self-guided and can last two to three hours. Because of the graphic images of the hounding and murder of the victims, it is recommended that children under the age of 11 not visit the Permanent Exhibition. On the first floor, there is a separate exhibition for young children, called Daniel’s Story. It gives the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of a child in Nazi Germany.

The elevators to the fourth floor are like cold, grim steel containers. The story starts on this floor and covers the “Nazi Assault”​—1933-39. Here you see how Nazi propaganda achieved control of the German population and instilled fear and terror, especially in the hearts of the millions of European Jews. What do you find on the third floor?

This floor has the ominous theme “Final Solution”​—1940-45. It “describes the ghettos, deportations, slave labor, and concentration camps, and the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ [elimination of the Jews and others] through instruments of destruction such as mobile killing units and the death camps,” according to the visitors guide.

The second floor has a more positive theme, “Last Chapter.” It explains “rescue, resistance, liberation, and survivors’ efforts to rebuild their lives.” On one side of the floor is the Wexner Learning Center, which includes something of great interest to many of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At computer terminals the visitor can access histories of some of the Witnesses who suffered and, in some cases, paid with their lives.

For example, you can trace the heroic account of Helene Gotthold, from Dortmund, Germany. The mother of two children, she insisted on attending Christian meetings in spite of a Nazi ban. She was executed by guillotine in December 1944. Many more histories of victims and martyrs of the concentration camp era can also be viewed.

On this floor too is the remarkable Tower of Life (also known as the Tower of Faces), which rises up through three floors. It is a collection of hundreds of photographs of the Jewish inhabitants of Eishyshok, now known as Eisiskes, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The photographs were taken between 1890 and 1941. It was a Jewish community that flourished for 900 years. Then in 1941 a mobile SS killing squad (Einsatzkommando) massacred the whole Jewish population in just two days! According to official Nazi records, 3,446 Jews were eliminated​—989 males, 1,636 females, and 821 children. The Nazi bureaucracy was very thorough.

Also on the second floor is the Hall of Remembrance, which has Bible texts, such as Deuteronomy 30:19 and Genesis 4:9, 10, inscribed on the marble walls. Included are several evidences of the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, such as the purple triangle they had to wear as an identifying badge. Keep your eyes open to pick them out as you take your tour. There are many more features of the museum that are worthy of investigation, including the huge research facility on the fifth floor.

When you leave the museum and get back out on the street, you will breathe a sigh of relief. But now let us move on to the newest of Washington’s museums, one that covers a different kind of history that also includes attempted genocide.

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The Tower of Life rises up through three floors

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A concentration camp uniform worn by one of Jehovah’s Witnesses

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Helene Gotthold

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USHMM, courtesy of Martin Tillmans