Collections

The Buchenwald Memorial collects tangible objects from the areas of the Buchenwald concentration camp / National Socialism, the Soviet Special Camp No. 2 / post-war period, the Buchenwald National Memorial / antifascism in the German Democratic Republic, and the Buchenwald Memorial in reunified Germany.

The collection has meanwhile grown to encompass approximately 7,000 inventoried items. It moreover includes about 11,000 finds from excavations carried out on the grounds of the memorial site since 1994. Most of the items recovered were personal utensils and other objects testifying to the everyday lives of the inmates.

The oldest and by far most extensive part of the collection—accounting for about 70 per cent of the inventoried objects—is that relating to the Buchenwald concentration camp and the Nazi period.

As a result of more than thirty years of collecting, the foundation also has approximately 10,000 historical photographs in its holdings. The photographs were taken during the period of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps (1937–1945), immediately after the camps' liberation, after the dissolution of Soviet Special Camp No. 2 (1945–1950), in the two GDR memorial sites (1945–1990), and in the phase of their redevelopment from 1990 onwards. There are moreover sub-archives of the work of individual photographers and bequests from camp survivors.

Artworks donated to the memorial site by concentration camp survivors beginning in the 1950s form the basis of the art collection. Beginning in the 1970s, a systematic collection effort was undertaken. The focal points are art from concentration camps, works by former prisoners, works for memorials, and works by contemporary artists who deal with the rupture in civilization caused by National Socialism.

The art collection currently includes a total of over 4,000 objects, including around 2,100 originals. From the camp period, there are around 1,300 sketches, studies, and paintings using various techniques. In addition, there are 350 drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures created after 1945, as well as around 400 contemporary works of art.

The core of the art collection consists of sketches, drawings, small-format paintings in pencil, ink, watercolor, or oil on paper, cardboard, plywood, canvas, and wooden sculptures from the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, and other concentration camps. The works were usually created in the camp using low-quality materials and therefore require special conservative care.

Examples of such works are the drawing cycles by Maria Brzęcka-Kosk, Giulio Cargnelutti, José Fosty, Paul Goyard, Karol Konieczny, Henri Pieck, and Karl Schulz, individual drawings such as those by Dominik Černy, Flemming Hinsch, Herbert Sandberg, and Ivar Emil Thomsen, and sculptures by Bruno Apitz.

In addition to works from and after the concentration camp period that are directly related to the camp theme, the art collection also includes hand drawings and graphic works that were created before and outside the camps in Germany or in exile, including around 100 sketches by the French artist Paul Goyard from the First World War and 100 drawings by Alfred Ahner (on permanent loan from the Ahner Foundation), created in Weimar between 1920 and 1945.

Among the retrospectively created works by survivors are hand drawings and installations Józef Szajna, drawing cycles by Nachum Bandel, Leonid Carizynskij, Boris Lurie, and Max Lingner, print cycles by Hermann Bruse, José Fosty, Gaston Gentillon, Hans Grundig, and Herbert Sandberg, and sculptures by Walter Spitzer and Fischel Liberman. Józef Szajna’s room installation Reminiscences has been in the collection's permanent holdings since 2022.

Among the sculptural and graphic designs for monuments are those by Theo Balden, Fritz Cremer, René Graetz, Hans Kies, Waldemar Grzimek, Johann-Peter Hinz, Will Lammert, Heinz Scharr, Wieland Schmiedel, Siegfried Tschierschky, and Erich Wurz.

The contemporary works encompass pieces by Jürgen Brodwolf, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Rosemarie Kočzÿ, Klaus Steinke, Jenny Stolzenberg, Georg Lutz, Gerhard Kurt Müller, and Franz Anatol Wyss.