The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been in the news a bit lately, but probably not for any reason that they’d like. The shooting there by a white supremacist is awful, of course, and deserves the news coverage that it got.
But I’m sad that it seems to have overshadowed another reason the museum could have made the news. On just about the same day as the shooting occurred, I read a very interesting article in the Toronto Star about the launch of a new book, published by the museum. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos aims to be “the first comprehensive survey of all known Nazi camps and ghettos.”
So far, they’ve only completed Volume I, but they’ve already learned a lot. From the Star:
More than 20,000 individual sites were established under Adolf Hitler in the 12 years between the Nazi rise to power and the end of World War II, ranging from the notorious extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka to a little-known network of more than 500 brothels in which European women were enslaved for the pleasure of Wehrmacht storm troopers.
That’s about four times the previously-estimated camp size.
[It] points to the concept of a camp as “a sort of leitmotif that ran through the Nazi regime much more deeply than it did anywhere else,” [says project director Geoffrey Megargee]. “It seems that any time the Nazis ran up against any kind of complex problem their answer was to form a camp. They had camps for so many different things.”
At $295, I’m not about to purchase a copy, but I expect a lot of interesting research will come from this resource. And they’ve got six more volumes planned.
Grant Hamilton
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