DR KLAUS MUELLER
Dr. Klaus Mueller facilitates initiatives with museums, foundations and NGOs. He works as an international consultant for a number of cultural institutions, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum* in Washington DC. He serves as the Museum’s Representative for Europe on its core themes of Holocaust documentation and education, antisemitism today, and genocide prevention.
He has worked for the Museum in different capacities since 1992. During the conception of the Museum’s permanent exhibition, Dr. Mueller, an expert on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, served as a consultant, researching and overseeing the inclusion of material documenting the experiences of homosexuals under Nazism. He co-curated the Museum’s exhibition on Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story and developed Do you remember when, an online exhibit on two young gay Jewish men in Nazi Berlin. In 2005-07, he was part of the US State Department delegation in negotiations with eleven countries and the International Red Cross on the opening of the International Tracing Service Archives. From 2009 to 2025, he served on the United States Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and chaired the IHRA’s Committee on Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes against Humanity in 2018. Between 2010 and 2017 he served as Chair of the Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Initiative.
Dr. Mueller also works as an independent filmmaker. He was initiator, research director, and associate producer of the award-winning Paragraph 175 (2000), which profiles gay survivors of Nazi persecution, and assistant director of But I was a Girl (1999), which is based on his interview with lesbian Dutch resistance fighter Frieda Belinfante (See 2021 USHMM Facebook Conversation on Frieda Belinfante here). In 2017 he directed Family Is…? A Global Conversation, which explores the complexities of LGBT lives in their families of birth, their families of choice and the families they raise. In 2022 he worked with Eurovision Song Contest winner Duncan Laurence on a documentary on the Nazi persecution of LGBT+ people. He collaborated with Ottawa’s Carleton University on the online course Hear Our Voices: Holocaust Survivors Share their Stories of Trauma and Hate contributing his work with gay survivors and exploring the interviewer’s role in conducting oral history testimonies. He served as the historical and dramaturgical consultant for the 2023 NETFLIX documentary ‘Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate‘. In Berlin: City of Memorials (2023), Dr. Mueller introduced six Berlin memorials for the Sardari project, a partnership of the USHMM and IranWire; he was also interviewed in the 2024 film 82 Names: Syria, Please Don’t Forget Us by Maziar Bahari. He worked on and was interviewed in the 2024 documentary ‘Playing to Survive: von Cramm vs. Hitler’ (now on PBS and PRIME), and in a documentary on gay survivor Heinz Heger. Dr. Mueller taught film & cultural history at the University of Amsterdam (1993-2002) and writes film and cultural arts reviews.
He has published widely in museum journals on outreach to new constituencies, the virtual representation of museum objects in online exhibitions and the evolving role of museum websites. For the 2003 issue of Museum News, he contributed the cover story The Culture of Globalization. He served as guest editor for the 2005 special issue of the American museum journal Curator on Museums and Globalization. Dr. Mueller is a founding Board Member of ICOM’s International Committee of Memorial and Human Rights Museums.
In 2005 he published two books in Dutch (Dutch gay men and women in the resistance; Research on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals) and developed an exhibition on the moral and civic values at stake, titled Wie kan ik nog vertrouwen? (Netherlands 2006-2012). A redesigned English version In whom can I still trust?, commissioned by the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation, opened in Cape Town, South Africa in 2013, and was shown in Durban, Pretoria, Bloemfontein and the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Center between 2014-17. Dr. Mueller curated the remembrance space ‘Within the Pink Triangle‘ at the German Historical Museum as part of the larger exhibition on ‘Homosexualities‘ in 2015.
In 2013, Dr. Klaus Mueller founded the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum to create a global platform for advancing LGBT human rights and building a network of international leaders from diverse fields. The Forum brought together leaders from human rights, legal, artistic, and religious backgrounds through convenings in Salzburg, Berlin, Chiang Rai, Kathmandu, and online. By 2023, the Forum had grown into a network spanning 76 countries. However, global cuts in LGBT funding in 2025 brought its activities to a halt. While the convenings ended, the sense of belonging to a global community of LGBT leaders remains strong, and Fellows continue to collaborate across borders and continents.
Dr. Mueller holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Master’s degree in German Literature and Philosophy, both from the University of Muenster, Germany. He has been a fellow of the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst, the German Research Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Salzburg Global Seminar.
*Views expressed on my website are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
FORMER AND PRESENT CLIENTS INCLUDE
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC
U.S. State Department, Washington DC
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Telling Pictures, San Francisco
Swedish Museum Association, Sweden
Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Germany
South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation
Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles
Schorer Foundation, Netherlands
Salzburg Global Seminar
Roosevelt University Chicago
Rheinisches Archiv- und Museumsamt, Germany
Reinwardt Academy Museum Studies, Netherlands
PrideFest America, Philadelphia
Pink Triangle Coalition
Open Society Institute, Slovenia
Museums News, American Alliance for Museums
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Germany
LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster
Kreuzberger Initiative genen Antisemitismus, Berlin
Jewish Museum, Berlin
International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization, Slovenia
Institute for Jewish Studies, Belgium
Imperial War Museum, London
Humboldt University, Germany
Heinrich Böll Foundation, Germany
Harenberg Verlag, Germany
Goethe Institute, Amsterdam
Germany Close Up
Gallagher & Associates, Washington
Fund for Arts and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe
Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, Germany
Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany
Frame Media Productions, Netherlands
Foundation IHLIA, Netherlands
Dutch Ministry of Culture, Netherlands
De Groene Amsterdammer, Netherlands
Czech National Memory Project, Czech Republic
City University, London
City of Stuttgart, Germany
Best of Heritage, Croatia
Austrian Federal Chancellery
Anne Frank Foundation, Netherlands
Amsterdams 4 en 5 mei comité, Netherlands
Amnesty International, Netherlands
ALMS 2019
Accept, Romania