On May 12-15, 2019, a delegation of employees of the Treblinka Museum convened over memorial sites in the state of Saxony – Anhalt.
The trip took place within the partnership of the Mazovian Voivodeship and Saxony – Anhalt. Employees along with the Director of the Museum Edward Kopówka visited:
- The former psychiatric hospital in Bernburg, which as of November 1940 was functioning as one of the six T4 Action centers, known for the “euthanasia” program, i.e. the mass murder of disabled people in Germany;
- Der Rote Ochse, a former political prison in Halle for opponents of Nazism, operating in the years 1933 – 1945, in which Krystyna Wituska, a soldier of the underground intelligence, was murdered. In 1945-1989, this prison was used by the Stasi;
- Place of Remembrance in Gardelegen, the memorial commemorating the Crime at Gardelegen, i.e. the murder of 1,016 prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora and Hannover-Stöcken camps. SS and Luftwaffe soldiers locked prisoners in a brick barn and then burned them alive. The crime was discovered 2 days later by soldiers of the 102nd Division of the US Army. 7 Poles, 3 Russians and 1 Frenchman survived the massacre.
The Museum’s crew also visited the remains of the Magdeburg Fortress, which, as a place of internment of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, is a highly significant place for Polish-German relations.
As part of the trip, there were also meetings with representatives of the Political Headquarters and the Minister of Education of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt concerning the coordination of further cooperation between the Treblinka Museum and the German side.