Pieces of the Past: Souvenirs from Nazi Sites — The Example of Peenemünde

Abstract

‘Buy a replica of our box car in our museum store,’¹ ran the invitation of the Florida Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, until 2005. The museum proudly presents one of the remaining railroad boxcars used by the Nazis for the deportation of Jews, of which only a few are exhibited throughout the United States. Moreover, donors who joined a ‘platinum membership’ scheme received an ‘original’ railroad spike from Treblinka in decorative pink packaging as a reward for their customer loyalty. This extreme example can be complemented by a number of others: Auschwitz at sunset on a postcard, a baseball cap and a t-shirt emblazoned with stars and barbed wire (Fossoli), a stick pin depicting barbed wire and a rose (Ravensbrück), a windcheater with an emblem on its chest showing a leg bound in chains (Buchenwald), The Diary of Anne Frank as a fridge magnet: this is just a small selection of souvenir items, ordinary products of mass consumption, linked to places and events of National Socialist terror and the Holocaust.