United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On November 1, 1978, President Jimmy Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, a prominent author, activist, and Holocaust survivor. Its mandate was to investigate the creation and maintenance of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust and an appropriate annual commemoration to them. The mandate was a joint effort of Wiesel and Richard Krieger (the original papers are on display at the Jimmy Carter Museum). On September 27, 1979, the commission presented its report to the President, recommending the establishment of a national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington, D.C., with three main components: a national museum/memorial, an educational foundation, and a Committee on Conscience.

After a unanimous vote by the United States Congress in 1980 to establish the museum, the federal government made available 1.9 acres (0.77 ha) of land adjacent to the Washington Monument for construction. Under the founding director Richard Krieger, subsequent director Jeshajahu Weinberg and Chairman Miles Lerman, nearly $190 million was raised from private sources for building design, artifact acquisition, and exhibition creation. In October 1988, President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of the building, designed by architect James Ingo Freed. Dedication ceremonies on April 22, 1993, included speeches by American president Bill Clinton, Israeli president Chaim Herzog, Chairman Harvey Meyerhoff, and Elie Wiesel. On April 26, 1993, the museum opened to the general public. Its first visitor was the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

Attacks

In 2002, a federal jury convicted white supremacists Leo Felton and Erica Chase of planning to bomb a series of institutions associated with American Black and Jewish communities, including the USHMM.

On June 10, 2009, 88-year-old James von Brunn, an antisemite, shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Special Police Officer Johns and von Brunn were seriously wounded and transported by ambulance to the George Washington University Hospital. Special Police Officer Johns later died of his injuries; he is permanently honored in an official memorial at the USHMM. Von Brunn, who had a previous criminal record, died before the conclusion of his federal criminal trial, in Butner federal prison in North Carolina.

Controversy

As a result of lobbying by Turkey, Israel, and American Jewish organizations, there is no mention of the Armenian genocide in the permanent exhibition. Individuals involved in the museum including Stuart Eizenstat and Monroe H. Freedman reported that Turkish diplomats told them that the safety of Jews in Turkey was not guaranteed if the museum included content on the Armenian genocide.

After U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the detention camps along the Mexico–United States border "concentration camps", and used the phrase "never again" in June 2019, the USHMM published a statement declaring that it "unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary." A group of historians and scholars called this "a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide", which "made learning from the past almost impossible."

In 2025, the museum removed materials on topics such as German society before the Nazi regime, African American Soldiers during World War II, Afro-Germans during the Holocaust, and connections between racism in the United States and Nazi Germany. Former staff stated that the museum preemptively removed content to avoid negative attention from the Trump administration.

The USHMM received sharp criticism from Norman Finkelstein, who asked why the victims of the Holocaust have a national museum but not the victims of slavery in the U.S. or the Native American genocide. He also argued that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust—especially the victims of the Romani Holocaust, or Porajmos—got only token recognition in the museum. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein argued that the museum's leadership is committed to political support of the Israeli state. In 2026, Holocaust historian Raz Segal and international law scholar Luigi Daniele wrote that while the museum had immediately condemned the 7 October attacks, it had remained silent on the Gaza war and did not mention the Nakba when discussing the foundation of Israel.