“Munich Displaced” is a pioneering exhibition focusing on displaced persons (DPs) that casts a spotlight on their different experiences during the immediate post-war period in Munich. This heterogeneous group of people had either fled to the German Reich or had been deported during WWII and had ended up in Munich in 1945.
Two exhibitions, which ran concurrently at the Jewish Museum Munich and the Münchner Stadtmuseum, framed the experiences and accounts of a range of DPs from very different cultural and religious backgrounds within a local historical context.
They explored the lives and fates of these people in Munich during the immediate post-war period and provided an important landmark in the history of immigration in Munich.
The Münchner Stadtmuseum’s latest exhibition, “Munich Displaced. After 1945 and without a Homeland” (July 5, 2023–January 1, 2024), traced the long-forgotten fates and accounts of around one hundred thousand DPs who ended up in Munich in 1945. For the very first time, the public was able to explore the post-war history of former forced laborers, prisoners of war, political concentration camp prisoners and refugees in Munich and its vicinities through this research-led exhibition. Some of these displaced persons spent months or even years in DP camps, and this gave them an opportunity to obtain the schooling they would need for their future lives.
The National Library of Lithuania lent some of its documentary material for the exhibition.