The former concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau has become synonymous worldwide with the Holocaust, the murder of European Jews. Other murder sites, however, where the perpetrators of National Socialist Germany also murdered tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, are today often “in the shadows” of attention and are hardly known or not known at all.

An excursion by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) in May 2016 went on a search for traces to nine places little or completely unknown – to Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, to places like Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Lublin-Majdanek, to Maly Trascjanec as well as to Babyn Jar, Kamjanez-Podilskyj and Lwiw-Janowska.

The search for traces was accompanied by the photographer Mark Mühlhaus; his pictures are the basis of this exhibition. For more than twenty years, Mark Mühlhaus has been concerned with the many different forms of remembrance of National Socialist crimes, especially the Holocaust, and the commemoration of the victims, and is careful not only to capture the superficial in photographs: His pictures are an approximation of the crime scenes of that time, and they give an impression of what it looks like at these places today, including today’s forms of commemoration and remembrance.