The Rosenberg – The Federal Ministry of Justice in the Shadow of the Nazi Past

The Exhibition is open:
Sunday to Thursday
08:30 – 20:00

Admission free of charge.
All welcome.

An important question posed for the Federal Republic
of Germany and its Ministry of Justice upon the republic’s
establishment in 1949 was how to address the horrors
of the Nazi era. In 2012, the Ministry undertook a study
of its response in the 1950‘s and 1960‘s, which revealed
what are best described as shocking failures by the
Ministry. A high percentage of Ministry senior staff
had backgrounds in the Nazi legal system and had
participated in the terrible misdeeds of that machinery. As a
result, during the early years of the German Republic, many
laws were denazi ed only super cially; discri- mination
continued; crimes of the Holocaust were not properly
prosecuted; and many Nazi criminals were
not brought to justice for decades, benefitting from
amnesties and statutes of limitation. This traveling

exhibition based on the Ministry’s own four years of seri-
ous introspection, research and study, compiled in what

are known as the Rosenburg Files – so named because
following World War II the Ministry’s of ces were located
in the Rosenburg Castle in Bonn – seeks to raise awareness
among a large audience of the historical injustice that took
place post World War II at the hands
of the Ministry itself.