Muzej narodne osvoboditve Maribor

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.

The Museum of National Liberation Maribor has an extensive collections and a particularly extensive photo library with many documentary photos and negatives as well as a lot of video and audio material. A special feature of the museum is its archive, which contains more than 120 linear meters of material from the Second World War.

A range of programs are offered for young visitors – traditional exhibition tours, creative workshops, a night at the museum, high school graduation preparation and lessons. The museum offers extensive educational and andragogical programs.

In the museum, visitors can explore the permanent exhibition to learn more about the history of Maribor in the 20th century. They can also visit industrial Maribor, the time of the battles for the northern Slovenian border, learn about General Rudolf Meister, the heyday of Maribor in the period between the First and Second World Wars and the fate of the inhabitants of Maribor during the Second World War.

In addition to the permanent exhibition, visitors can choose from numerous temporary exhibitions, which are often developed in cooperation with similar institutions in Slovenia and abroad.

In addition to the main museum, there is also the Maribor Photography Museum at Koroška cesta 19. In the late 1980s, private collectors Maria in Avgust Bohanec donated a collection of 1100 cameras and 600 pieces of equipment to the city of Maribor. In the museum, their collection is supplemented by cameras from Slovenian photographers. Part of the Bohanec collection and an overview of the history of photography are exhibited in the museum, and there is also a gallery of Slovenian and foreign photographic gems.

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.