The former Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London  

  
Naturally, there aren't many original Holocaust artefacts in Britain, apart from memorabilia donated by survivors who settled in the UK (which are well represented). But the exhibition is impressively augmented by loans from memorial museums such as Majdanek in Poland. It thus strikes a very good balance between textual and photographic exposition of the historical developments, some multi-media elements (especially video screens) and various reconstructions to supplement the original artefacts.
   
It is also well balanced as regards the amount of information presented – neither too abbreviated nor too much information overload. It is the museum's express intention to aim at school groups who visit as part of their studies, so getting this balance right was certainly a key factor in the design of the exhibition. There is necessarily some simplification, but overall I found the right balance maintained. It's not too excessive, but the visitor is not spared some rather graphic illustrations of the horrors of the Holocaust.
  
Interestingly, there is the option of taking a "shortcut" between the point where the exhibition passes from the topics of ghettos and mobile killing squads ("Einsatzgruppen") to "resettlement" so that you can go straight to the final section beginning with the destruction of evidence by the Nazis and the discovery of the crimes by the Allies. That way visitors can avoid going through the grimmest part of the exhibition, especially the industrial mass-murdering operations of Auschwitz and the Operation Reinhard death camps. But if you can stomach it you should not skip this part.
  
These grimmest details of humanity's darkest chapter are illustrated also through the aid of some remarkable exhibits: part of a deportation railcar (donated by Belgian Railways), a canister of Zyklon B gas pellets (as used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek), partly torn striped concentration camp inmates' uniforms, and, as so often, victims' shoes …     
  
What I found the most impressive exhibit of the entire museum was the scale model of a section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp – stretching from the gatehouse and the ramp to the gas chambers and crematoria at the far end, flanked by just one row of barracks to stand for the sea of barracks that made up the rest of the camp's main area. The scale is probably something like 1:60 or so, but it still fills a whole room.

  

The scene depicted in the diorama is that of the selection of a newly arrived deportation train transport from a Hungarian ghetto. You see tiny figures of guards and row upon row of new arrivals, selected either for work or already en route to the gas chambers. It's all in white plaster, no colour.
  
This model calls for a comparison with a similar model at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that's also made from pure white plaster. The latter, however, uses a larger scale (maybe 1:15 or so) and concentrates on the gassing process itself: from the herding of victims into the room where they would get undressed to the agony in the gas chamber and the cremation of the bodies. It's ghastlier in that the scale allows faces to show expressions – including that of dying a most horrific death. This gives the model a real haunting effect, possibly even verging on the traumatizing.

  

The model at the IWM, on the other hand, succeeds less through such direct depiction of the horror experienced by the people in the scene (due to the smaller scale – they're all just tiny little figurines – one can't make out any facial expressions). Rather, it's the enormity of the industrial-scale operation of the whole camp that becomes tangible here (and less so at the USHMM). It's almost like the aerial view that a reconnaissance plane would have had flying over the camp at that point in time. Both models function as central and crucially harrowing exhibits to represent Auschwitz and both use the same material technique of white plaster – but they are very different in psychological effect.

 

The Holocaust exhibition at the IWM is augmented by video screens, placed throughout its various subsections, on which testimonies by survivor-eyewitnesses, who then settled in Britain, are played in a loop. This is the main element personalizing the narrative of the exhibition (apart from victims' letters and family memorabilia), and forms an important counterweight in the overall balance.

  

The one passage that stands out most in my memory of the museum is one man saying that when people ask him "how did you survive?" (the camps and the death marches) his sole answer can always only be "I don't know!" – and he reasons that ultimately this is probably what most survivors would have to say. It certainly underscored the "incomprehensibility aspect" of the whole story of the Holocaust.
  
Almost serving as a kind of  "decompression chamber", the exhibition finishes with the war crimes tribunals (cf. Memorium Nuremberg Trials) and with some general reflections before releasing the visitor from the dark of the Holocaust exhibition's black-walled rooms to the bright light of the 2nd floor gallery outside.
  
Next to the exit from the Holocaust exhibitionthere was (at the time of my visit in 2010), a complementing, though much smaller extra exhibition on "crimes against humanity". This in particular covered the other genocides of the 20th Century, especially those in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, Sudan. On my return visit in January 2015 I did not see this extra part, but neither did I specifically look for it. So I cannot be sure whether or not this section is still there.