The general framework and storyline of the exhibition were the work of Professor Paweł Machcewicz, Dr Piotr Majewski, Dr Janusz Marszalec, and Dr Rafał Wnuk. Most importantly, a team of curators worked in parallel on the exhibition content. All those milestones in the process of creating the exhibition were ultimately reflected in its appearance. The construction of the exhibition itself was commissioned in 2015 to a consortium led by the Warsaw-based Qumak S.A. In 2013, the No Label/New Amsterdam company from Kraków started work on the multimedia and audio-visual materials for the exhibition. Two years later, construction work began in a central district of Gdańsk that had not been reconstructed after the Second World War and is located just a few minutes’ walk from the main tourist area of the Hanseatic city. In 2010, the Kwadrat studio based in Gdynia won the competition for the design of the museum building, which was to take the form of a tower, with the permanent exhibition being housed 14 metres below ground level. won the competition for the design of the exhibition. A year later, the Belgian design studio NV Tempora S.A. The Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk was officially established in 2008. The Polish public (as well as many professionals and historians) who have discussed the permanent exhibition in Gdańsk, tend to forget that an exhibition as such is, and should be, a multi-dimensional endeavour, going much further than merely presenting a selection of historical issues, allowing visitors to experience history in many different ways. The considerable waves that the political dispute generated, unfortunately, has eclipsed more thorough and content-related discussions about the exhibition as such. The dispute concerned the main storyline of the exhibition but, in fact, it had little to do with history and much more with current Polish politics. At the same time, the exhibition, unlike any other of comparable importance, was able to entirely forgo self-promotion, as this was provided by the media, both Polish and international, which widely reported on the dispute between the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the museum’s management.

In recent years, no other museum exhibition in Poland has aroused such strong feelings as the permanent exhibition of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk.

Instal The Second World War