The Polish government has preserved the site as a research centre and in memory of the 1.1 million people who died there, including 960,000 Jews, during World War II and the Holocaust.

[5] The museum was created in April 1946 by Tadeusz Wąsowicz and other former Auschwitz prisoners, acting under the direction of Poland's Ministry of Culture and Art.

In Stalinist Poland, on the seventh anniversary of the first deportation of Polish captives to Auschwitz, the exhibition was revised with the assistance of former inmates.

The question of the territories annexed by the USSR during the war, i.e. the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, and Moldova could not be solved.

This one-sided view motivated[10] the Austrian political scientist Andreas Maislinger to work in the museum within the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in 1980/81.

Although the Polish government permitted the construction of film sets on its grounds to shoot scenes for Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg chose to build a "replica" camp entrance outside the infamous archway for the scene in which the train arrives carrying the women who were saved by Oskar Schindler.

A short while later, a Star of David appeared at the site, leading to a proliferation of religious symbols, which were eventually removed.

One year later, the Carmelites erected an 8 m (26 ft) tall cross from the 1979 mass near their site, just outside Block 11 and barely visible from within the camp.

[13][14][15] On the 78th anniversary of the camp's liberation in 2023, the Russian delegation to Poland was not invited, due to the country's invasion of Ukraine.

Entrance security screening is operated at Auschwitz I in which the vast majority of exhibitions, including the former gas chamber and crematorium, are located.

[18] Early in the morning on 18 December 2009, the Arbeit macht frei ('work makes you free') sign over the gate of Auschwitz I was stolen.

[23][24] Conservationists restored the sign to its original condition, and it currently is in storage, awaiting eventual display inside the museum.

[27] Polish Foreign Minister Stefan Meller said his country should stop Iran from investigating the scale of the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had dismissed as a myth.

[28] Iran has recently tried to leave the Ahmadinejad rhetoric in the past, but President Rouhani has never repudiated his predecessor's idea that the scale of the Holocaust is exaggerated.

[30] Czechoslovakian Jew Dina Babbitt imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943–1945 painted a dozen portraits of Romani inmates for the war criminal Josef Mengele during his medical experiments.

Officials from the museum led by Rabbi Andrew Baker stated that the portraits belonged to the SS and Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979.

There was an initiative to have the museum return the portraits in 1999,[31] headed by the U.S. government petitioned by Rafael Medoff and 450 American comic book artists.