And all part of the Nazi killing machine.
New research has revealed there were more than 42,000 individual sites — ranging from massive concentration camps to small ghettoes — established by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The number far exceeds the fewer than 10,000 sites researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum expected they’d uncover when the project began 13 years ago.
“The number itself is shocking — it really highlights how widespread the system was, and how many people had to be aware of it,” lead editor Geoffrey Megargee said in an interview. “It helps people understand the parts of the system, and how complex it was.”
Sites documented by the project include the well-known, such as the massive Auschwitz and Treblinka concentration camps. But it also counts prisoner-of war-camps, work-education camps, “Germanization” camps — where kidnapped or orphaned Polish children were taken to determine if they possessed valuable racial characteristics — small ghettoes, and brothels where women were forced to have sex with German soldiers.
And the results, which are being compiled in a seven-volume set of encyclopedias by the Washington, D.C.-based museum, include an astonishing number of forced labour camps — about 30,000.
“It was impossible to go anywhere in Germany and not know there were forced labourers at work,” Megargee said. “Every butcher, every baker, every candlestick maker, every railroad, school, government institution all had their quotas of forced labour.
“You just couldn’t escape the fact that these things were around.”
When Megargee began the research, he expected to find about 7,500 sites. A few years later, that rose to 20,000. And the new findings have surprised even the most informed scholars: “Just when you think you have the whole thing under control, along comes something else to upend all of that,” said Michael Marrus, professor emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto.
Detailed records kept by the Germans and the fall of the Iron Curtain — and the subsequent release of previously unseen material — have helped advance Holocaust research, Marrus said. But the confusion of wartime, the sometimes fading recollections of survivors and the lack of witnesses have, until now, kept the existence of some sites in the shadows.
“That’s one of the reasons for the great underestimation,” Marrus said. “And when you consider that sometimes, there are no survivors — plus, people are moved from one camp to the other, so sometimes people remember the camp that is largest or best known.”
As time passes and memories of the war recede, the new research is an effective reminder of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, said Sara Horowitz, director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.
“I don’t think we lose the capacity to be shocked, but sometimes I think the general public, they think, ‘Yes, yes, we know all about it,’ ” Horowitz said.
“The main point is the intricate web that was woven by the genocidal machinery in Nazi Germany,” she added. “Those of us who work on aspects of the Holocaust — we never lose the capacity to be shocked by it.”
For Megargee and fellow editor Martin Dean, the task of documenting the sites is not just a historical project — it’s also a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. At an early meeting to discuss their findings, Megargee recalls one survivor standing and placing his hand on the first volume and saying, “This is a holy book.”
“It keeps the Holocaust alive by personalizing it, and saving the personal experiences,” Dean added. “Many survivors have told me that when they were in these camps, they vowed to tell the story. It’s a very huge, complex story.”
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Jennifer Quinn
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