17 January 2018 MUSEUM 39/45 (2 Priešpilio Street, Klaipėda) belonging to the History Museum of Lithuania Minor was opened. It is located under a rampart, on the site of the eastern curtain wall of the former Klaipėda Castle, where during the war Germans set up a warehouse for explosives. This museum presents a very important and painful period of history to Klaipėda city and region — The Second World War.

In March 1939, Germany gave an ultimatum demanding the handover of the Klaipėda region, and it was done by treaty on 22 March. In the museum’s “Klaipėda on the Eve of the War” hall, for the first time in Lithuania, one can see and read documents testifying the war, as well as view photographs and film chronicles from that period. The cardinal changes in Europe at the time are depicted on an original animated map. In this hall, the fates of persecuted Lithuanian, Jewish and French prisoners of war are revealed, and fortification systems are introduced.

The hall “The Storming of Klaipėda” presents the extremely tragic history of the city of Klaipėda and its residents. In October 1944, surrounded Klaipėda was intensively bombed and fired upon. All this is demonstrated “live” in a virtual projection.  After 115 days of siege on 28 January 1945, when the Red Army entered Klaipėda, everything around was on fire and mines were exploding. Approximately 60% of the city’s buildings were destroyed and almost all of the residents were gone. In the display case which is shown in this exposition one can see exactly what type of weapons were used during the Second World War.

The hall “Klaipėda After the War” displays an installation dedicated to the memory of the destroyed churches of the city, and a photo-essay reveals what Klaipėda looked like in the first days after the war and how it changed. This is particularly evident in one of the computer terminals which provides an interactive comparison between the losses of 1942 and post-war Klaipėda. Soviet film chronicles are also shown alongside.

The museum’s exposition ends with the “Memory” hall. There is a symbolic 6 metre long wagon with a glass lid, and underneath it there are a lot of simple household items that once belonged to both German soldiers and civilians in Klaipėda. The glass is covered with a layer of sand, so one will have to use their fingers to brush it off to see the exhibits. Then one might be surprised to see an aluminium mug of a former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys or a child’s doll that accompanied a girl to deportation in Siberia, and after 1953, has returned to Lithuania together with its owner. On a screen next to this symbolic wagon, the grim statistics of the Second World War can be seen.