Imperial War Museum’s £30m plan to show how Holocaust shaped war

The Imperial War Museum has revealed £30.5 million plans for a series of new Second World War galleries focusing on the Holocaust and its importance in the wider conflict.

Spreading across two floors and due to open in 2021, the galleries will aim to show how the Nazis not only used concentration camps to murder more than six million Jews, but also used them as part of its war effort, forcing prisoners to build the bombs that fell on Britain.

Museum bosses have said that no other exhibition has gone to such lengths to present the story of the Holocaust within the context of the wider conflict, how the policy of mass murder was formulated by the Nazis, and how the Holocaust’s progress was affected by the course of the war.

A 783kg V-1 flying bomb, known as a “doodlebug” will hang between a set of Second World War galleries and a set of Holocaust galleries to present “a striking symbol of how the Holocaust and the Second World War are interconnected”.

The museum said: “Over 10,000 of these ‘doodlebugs’ were launched at London and other British cities, killing over 6,000 people. Many thousands of concentration camp prisoners, labouring in the most appalling conditions, died making these weapons in Nazi Germany.”

Personal stories will be placed at the heart of some 3,000 square metres of displays, revealing the experiences of the victims and their persecutors. The scheme has been backed by the Duke of Cambridge.

The latest plans are to be published today to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. They will reveal six distinct spaces that will trace how whole societies were drawn into the most devastating war in human history.

The galleries will look at how antisemitism grew before the war and “how Nazi policy crossed the threshold into wide-scale state-sponsored murder in the heart of 20th-century Europe”. A digitally enabled learning suite will be installed and, given a recent rise in antisemitism, a new public engagement programme will be launched.

The galleries will also “examine how the course of the Second World War as well as ideology and individual decision-making were all critical factors in the execution of the Holocaust”. “It’s always crucial to be reminded of where racism can lead,” James Taylor, the gallery content leader at the museum, said. “This is a thorough reappraisal of our collection and we wanted to take a fresh approach, put Britain’s war effort into a global context and really understand how total war led to mass murder on a greater scale than ever before.”

Diane Lees, director-general of the museum (IWM), said: “At the centre of the brutal and barbaric conflict was the state sponsored mass murder of six million Jewish men, women and children. This is why we are placing IWM’s new Holocaust Galleries at the chronological fulcrum of our iconic London museum and linking them, architecturally and conceptually, to our new Second World War galleries.”