One Hope From Changes at This Holocaust Museum: Fewer Nazi Selfies

Students on school trips to a Holocaust museum outside Detroit would stand riveted at one stark display: a Nazi officer’s black uniform with a red swastika armband, guns and a whip.

Some couldn’t resist snapping selfies.

Now, however, the exhibit, at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., has been redone as part of a major redesign. The showcase with the uniform is still there, but the view of those artifacts is partially blocked by photographs of German soldiers lounging at ease or leading Jews to mass shooting sites.

“I don’t want them to see this uniform without facing the truth of these people who wore these uniforms,” said Mark Mulder, the museum’s curator and a scholar of what is called atrocity imagery.

In the same way, the museum has rearranged a pile of captured Nazi banners to obscure the swastikas. And gone altogether is a giant blowup of Hitler where some visitors were caught on security cameras giving the Nazi salute.

As the world marks another Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, commemorating the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz, some museum curators are reimagining how to present the grim lessons of Nazi genocide while grappling with how younger generations with little connection to those cataclysmic events behave in settings meant to memorialize immense suffering.