The Track

Starting on 19 May, 2010, as its official contribution to the 175th anniversary of German railways, the Documentation Centre Former Nazi Party Rally Grounds will show the exhibition "The Track. The Logistics of Racial Mania". It will offer a unique view of the most shocking chapter in German railway history.

The central piece of the exhibition will be the installation "The Track" (Design: Büro Müller-Rieger), as a complex artistic metaphor. By means of a direct image transfer, the installation for the first time links a "perpetrators' location" with the central locations of extermination: Nuremberg as the city where in 1935, 75 years ago, the National Socialists proclaimed their "Racial Laws", with Auschwitz-Birkenau and other places in Poland, as the central locations of extermination of human beings and symbols for the Holocaust. Now, within a network, these places stand as the beginning and end points for remembrance. For, seen in retrospect, the "Nuremberg Laws" proclaimed 75 years ago, lead, as a logical consequence to the extermination camps "in the east".

During the exhibition "The Track", the entire ground floor of the Documentation Centre Former Nazi Party Rallies will be accessible in a round tour for the first time. During this time, visitors will be able to experience rooms which are not usually accessible. These are uncompleted halls: coarse, bare brick walls correspond depressingly with the shabby and degrading buildings in the concentration and extermination camps. The round tour follows the path from the beginnings of National Socialist racial mania, its repercussions in everyday life and the consistent implementation of the deportation programme, right through to the sites of million-fold murder, as symbolised in the Installation "The Track".

Patron: Władisław Bartoszewski, former Polish foreign minister