The on-site-research at the National Liberation Museum Maribor was conducted in March 2024. According to the archivist in the museum, the archives of the Museum of National Liberation in Maribor do not contain any specific material about the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma and Sinti. However, the archives contain some testimonies of surviving internees from the concentration camps, some letters from internees to their relatives and newspapers from the concentration camps (Jež za žico, Vesti, Dachau Reporter), which were donated to the museum. The museum also does not keep any specific photographic material about the Holocaust and the genocide of Roma and Sinti in the museum's photo library. However, the museum has a permanent exhibition “Pst! Maribor 1941-1945,” which depicts the horrors that took place in Maribor and the surrounding area during the Second World War. In the final years before the war, Maribor was subjected to systematic humiliation by the Nazi-oriented German minority, which was organised in the Swabian-German Cultural Association (Kulturbund). The exhibition shows the fate of the internees, the stolen children, the prisoners of war, the hostages and those forcibly recruited into the German army, as well as the murders of the post-war period as a consequence of the Second World War. There are photos, posters, newspaper articles, documents and artefacts from this period, as well as a bomb found in Tržaška Street.
The Museum of National Liberation Maribor, founded by the then District People's Committee of Maribor, began its work on May 1, 1958. However, its origins date back to 1947, when a collection on the national liberation struggle was established in the Maribor Regional Museum. It was the first collection of its kind to be found in a complex Slovenian museum. The concept, i.e. a history museum that explores the recent history of north-eastern Slovenia in museological and historical terms, was precisely defined when it was founded. The museum is housed in a bourgeois villa on the corner of Mladinska ulica and Ulica Heroja Tomšiča, the construction of which was commissioned by the Maribor entrepreneur Avgust Scherbaum in the mid-1890s. His father, Karl Scherbaum, earned his place in Maribor's history by switching on 36 electric light bulbs in his mill in 1883, the first example of this in Slovenia. The Scherbaum family has left a strong mark on the history of Maribor.
Muzej narodne osvoboditve Maribor