Accessibility
The Museum Collections Department provides documentation for its holdings, carries out scholarly research on their history, and acquires historical items, often from former prisoners and their relatives.
For many years, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has supported exhibitions at historical museums around the world as a way of sharing the truth about Auschwitz with people in those countries.
This cooperation includes short-term loans to galleries and museums and long-term loans, mostly to museums and educational centers that deal with the Holocaust and the Nazi terror but do not have their own collections.
Items from the Memorial collections can be seen at
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, USA
- The Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, Israel
- Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
- The Jewish Holocaust Museum & Research Center in Melbourne (Elsternwick), Australia (copies)
Loan procedures are subject to the provisions of the Loan Agreement and Conditions of Loan. Lending the copies of the exhibits from the collections of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau is signed in accordance with different Lending Agreement form.
Objects from the collections are also made available at the Museum for research purposes, upon approval of a written request to the Collections Department, stating the purpose of the research.
The Museum charges a fee for photographing items in its collections, and for making these images available on electronic media:
• for taking photographs: 170 PLN per photograph (over 5 photographs — 120 PLN apiece)
• for copying photogrtaphs: 100 PLN per copy (over 5 copies — 70 PLN apiece)
Since making images available is regulated with a civil law agreement, the awaiting time for the image is approximately 3-4 weeks.
On request, the Director of the Museum or the deputies of the Director may waive 50 percent or the entirety of this fee in cases where the photographs are taken for scholarly, research or educational purposes, or at the behest of other cultural institutions.