The hundreds of items on display are so-called "emergency objects". In general, these are mostly urgently needed everyday objects such as furniture, kitchen utensils, lamps, clothing and toys, which were either produced by the users themselves or by craftsmen or industry during periods of shortage.
In Germany, there was extensive production of such items, particularly during the severe post-war supply crisis from 1945 to 1948. Ammunition, military material and war scrap in particular were processed. This was available in abundance as a result of the Second World War.
The exhibition, conceived in its original form by the industrial museum "Geschichtswerkstatt Herrenwyk" and greatly expanded by the Salder Castle Municipal Museum, focuses on this central survival aspect of the post-war period using hundreds of original objects. A child's dress made from a swastika flag, manure scoops and chamber pots made from steel helmets, butter glasses made from glass mines and Christmas bells made from pieces of shells - all this and much more can be seen.
The exhibits on display come from the private collections of Olaf Weddern and Peter Geissler as well as from the former collection of Dr. Wulf Haack, which the Förderkreis Schloss Salder recently acquired for the Städtisches Museum Schloss Salder.
The exhibition also takes a look at the situation in Salzgitter at the time. This young city - then still called Watenstedt-Salzgitter - owed its existence to armaments production before and during the war, for which mining and industry supplied raw materials and armaments with the massive use of forced labor.
Salzgitter also had to cope with the consequences of the war in the form of countless refugees. These people in particular, who, like the numerous displaced persons, often had nothing left, lived for years in barrack camps under terrible conditions and were much more dependent on emergency items than the old-established population.
Many of the objects on display appear unusual, strange and sometimes quite bizarre. Sometimes the military origin of an item can be recognized at first glance, in other cases not even on closer inspection. In any case, each individual emergency object documents a phase of history in which inventiveness and creativity helped to overcome the everyday misery resulting from the war started by Germany.
