Key Facts
Key Information
About
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is America's national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history, serving as a living memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide, including six million Jews and millions of others targeted in systematic, state-sponsored persecution. Chartered by the United States Congress in 1980 under the Carter administration as a governmental institution, the museum is located in Washington, D.C., and presents narrative history through over 900 artifacts, videos, eyewitness accounts, and exhibitions that explore the Holocaust, religious persecution, Judaism, antisemitism, and responses to Nazism. It maintains extensive library and archives collections, including memorial books by survivors, materials on the Catholic Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, and antisemitic literature, and supports traveling exhibitions like 'Americans and the Holocaust' in partnership with organizations such as the American Library Association. The USHMM offers vast educational resources for teachers and learners, engages in public programs, research, and survivor affairs, with dedicated contacts for education, research, library, archives, curation, and legal matters, while addressing the complex Holocaust history to foster understanding of motives, pressures, and fears during the 1930s and 1940s.