The museum was founded in 1912 by Karl August Lingner, a Dresden businessman and manufacturer of hygiene products, as a permanent "public venue for
healthcare education", following the first
International Hygiene Exhibition in 1911. The second International Hygiene Exhibition was held in 1930-31, in a building erected west of the
Großer Garten park according to plans designed by
Wilhelm Kreis, which became the museum's permanent home. One of the biggest attractions was, and remains, a transparent model of a human being, the
Gläserner Mensch or
Transparent Man, of which many copies have subsequently been made for other museums. During the
Third Reich the museum came under the influence of the Nazis, who used it to produce material propagandising their
racial ideology and promoting
eugenics. Various Nazi government offices relocated to the museum between 1933 and 1941, and the
German Labour Front's
Reichsberufswettkampf (National Vocational Competition) was held there in 1944. Large parts of the building and collection were destroyed by the
bombing of Dresden in 1945. In 1988 the museum, working in co-operation with East German gay and lesbian activists, commissioned
DEFA film studios to make the documentary film
Die andere Liebe (English:
The Other Love), the first East German film that dealt with the subject of homosexuality. The museum also commissioned the only HIV/AIDS prevention documentary produced in the GDR,
Liebe ohne Angst (
Love without fear) in 1989. Following
German reunification the museum was reconceived and modernised, starting in 1991. In 2001 it was included in the German government's Blue Book, a list of around 20 so-called "Cultural Lighthouses" – cultural institutions of national importance in the former East Germany – in an association called the
KNK. Between 2001 and 2005 the museum was renovated and partly rebuilt under the architect Peter Kulka. ==Exhibitions, collection and other activities==