Traveling exhibition on deportations

Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, the public broadcaster for the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, opened the traveling exhibition “Last Seen – Deported from Germany 1938–1945” in Leipzig on May 12, 2026.

The exhibition is part of the project “#LastSeen – Images of Nazi Deportations.” Since 2021, the project has been collecting, preserving, and researching photographs documenting Nazi deportations. The material collected so far has been compiled into a freely accessible image atlas featuring images from more than 70 German locations. These images refute the claim made by many Germans after the war that they were unaware of the extermination of Jews, Sinti, Romani, and people with disabilities. The involvement of the police, the Reichsbahn, and other institutions in the deportations alone contradicts this claim. The images show not only perpetrators and victims, but in many cases also bystanders who watched the deportees on their way to train stations. The goal of the project is to track down additional previously unknown photographs and to make the fates of the deportees visible. Currently, there is apparently a lack of photos from Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, and Cologne.

The exhibition was opened by MDR Director General Ralf Ludwig. Representatives of the Jewish community attended the event. Students from the Johanna-Moosdorf-Gymnasium in Leipzig and the project director, Dr. Alina Bothe (Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin), presented selected photographs and discussed their significance for German history. Among the guests were also faculty and students from the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture.