German Victims of Stalinism at the Moscow Cemetery Donskoje 1950-1953

The Exhibition

In addition to the book the travelling exhibition is designed to introduce to the public for the first time the up to now unknown happenings regarding the execution of almost 1,000 Germans in Moscow as well as the historical context. Decades had went by in which the families of the victims had gotten no information about the whereabouts of their relatives. For many of them, only the book and the exhibition bring certainty about the fate of the missing.

The exhibition shows historical documents, more than 500 portraits of victims, as well as current photographs of former locations like prisons in Berlin and Moscow.

Exhibition Concept

The outward walls of the exhibit introduce the general ordeal of the victims, the methods of prosecution, arresting, and conviction plus the following transportation of the doomed people by the MGB to Moscow and the execution in the prison Butyrka. Furthermore, you can find here information about the long and vain search of the families and about the final clarification with means of the research project. Five of the inner screens show “typical” groups of victims of the secret service during the time of the Cold War. They offer details, for example, about the resistance of students from a Altenburg High School and universities in Berlin and Rostock. The two middle screens inside the “cell” show the name and biographical data of the 927 people who were shot in Moscow.

Exhibition Schedule

The exhibition is currently on view at the DDR-Museum Perleberg.