In Spring 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) utilized the buildings and grounds of the former Flossenbürg Concentration Camp as a displaced persons camp. It was there that relocated Polish displaced persons transformed the concentration camp burial ground, originally laid by the US Army in May 1945 in the middle of the village Flossenbürg, into a memorial. On May 25, 1947, the "Valley of Death" (Tal des Todes) was inaugurated in the space of the former crematorium, one of the first concentration camp memorials in Europe, which consisted of a memory landscape housing a Christian chapel, symbolic national gravestones, and a pyramid made of ashes.

At the end of the 1950s, the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces (Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung) constructed another cemetery in a part of the former concentration camp. More than 5500 mostly unknown victims were exhumed along routes of death marches and reburied in Flossenbürg. The park-like layout of the cemetery site deliberately played down the historical circumstances of this violent mass death.

Only at the end of 1999, with the institutional establishment of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, did the transformation from a cemetery into a museum, place of remembrance, and place of learning begin in one of the central scenes of National Socialist persecution in Europe. Since 2003, the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial has been sponsored by the Foundation of Bavarian Memorial Sites (Stiftung Bayerische Gedenkstätten).

Award-winning permanent exhibitions on the history of the Concentration Camp and its aftermath were opened in 2007 and 2010. In 2015, the reconstruction of the outdoor area was completed with the opening of the Education Center and Museum Café .

Today, the critical examination of the history of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and its aftermath is one of the central concerns of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial.

Pictures: Flossenbürg Memorial