German History in Images and Artefacts from Two Millenia
Exhibition 
Permanent Exhibition 1933 - 1945
When Hitler was named chancellor in 1933, the National Socialists
quickly established a dictatorship that aimed to prepare Germany for
war through a radical transformation of state and society. The Nazi
state brutally persecuted its political opponents. Jews and others that
didn't fit the racist aberrations of the National Socialists were
ostracized from society. The German attack on Poland in 1939
launched the Second World War. By 1941 the German army had
occupied Denmark, Norway, the Benelux countries, France, Greece,
Yugoslavia and parts of northern Africa. During the invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941, special-operation units following in the wake of
the army murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Sinti and Romany
as well as Soviet functionaries.
As of 1942 the NS state deployed all
means to organize and implement the genocide of the European Jews in concentration camps by the millions. The Soviet Union, Great Britain and the USA formed a war coalition to combat the German wars of
aggression. After landing at Normandy in 1944, the Allied troops
drove back the German army on all fronts and advanced towards
Germany.
The Red Army began the attack on Berlin in April 1945.
Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 ended the Nazi
reign and the Second World War in Europe, which had claimed more
than 50 million human lives.
