United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America's national memorial to the Holocaust, on Raoul Wallenberg Place SW in Washington, DC, just south of the National Mall. Admission is free, with timed passes for the Permanent Exhibition in busy months. It suits adults and children aged 11 and older; a separate exhibition, Daniel's Story, is made for younger children.

Carter's commission, Elie Wiesel and a 1980 vote

The museum grew out of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, set up by Jimmy Carter on 1 November 1978 and chaired by the writer and survivor Elie Wiesel. Congress voted unanimously in 1980 to establish it, and it was built with private donations on federal land next to the Washington Monument, on a site of 1.9 acres.

Dedication on 22 April 1993 included speeches by President Bill Clinton, the Israeli president Chaim Herzog and Wiesel. The museum opened to the public on 26 April, and its first visitor was the Dalai Lama. By 2024 it had received nearly 50 million visitors, including more than 11 million schoolchildren and 120 heads of state.

James Ingo Freed's brick, steel and glass

James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners designed the building in brick, steel and glass to recall the architecture of ghettos and camps. Glass bridges are etched with the names of towns and communities destroyed in the Holocaust.

From 1933 to the aftermath across 900 artefacts

The Permanent Exhibition traces the Holocaust from the Nazi rise to power in 1933 through the war and its aftermath, using more than 900 artefacts, 70 video monitors and four theatres. Among the objects are a railcar of the type used to deport Jews to the camps, and thousands of victims' shoes on loan from the State Museum at Majdanek in Poland.

The Tower of Faces, rising through three floors, is lined with photographs from Eišiškės, a town in Lithuania whose Jewish community was massacred by German Einsatzgruppe units in September 1941. The visit ends at the Hall of Remembrance, a hexagonal hall with an eternal flame, the museum's official memorial to victims and survivors.

Archives, testimonies and the online encyclopedia

Behind the galleries sit one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world: more than 12,750 artefacts, 49 million pages of documents, 85,000 historical photographs and about 9,000 oral history testimonies. The online Holocaust Encyclopedia is published in many languages, including all six UN official languages. A plaque honours Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, a museum guard killed by an antisemitic gunman at the entrance on 10 June 2009.