The existing landscape of memorial museums is very diverse. Each institution represents only a part of the National Socialist apparatus of exclusion, imprisonment, and murder. The nearly 300 memorial museums, initiatives, and documentation centres in Germany listed in the memorial site overview are assigned to various crime complexes of the Nazi era.
Selection criteria are the central tasks and organisational structures of the prosecution facility at the respective historical crime scene. Depending on the crime complex, different groups were persecuted and murdered. The - mostly male - participants in the crimes are also to be differentiated in their activities and scope of action according to the various crime contexts.
The groups that were persecuted at the respective historical crime scene are honoured at the individual memorial museums. In this way, all groups of marginalised, persecuted, and murdered people are commemorated; this includes Jewish victims, Sinti and Roma, victims of the “euthanasia” murders and forced sterilisations, prisoners of war - especially from the Soviet Union - political opponents, homosexuals, so-called antisocial people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people required to perform forced labour.