THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

 Manchu wrote:
That's fascinating. Usually, we just think of the death camps. But when you keep the numbers in mind it seems obvious that these camps could only be one side of the operation. Just thinking about it, the death camps would have been impossible without ghettos operating like funnels. Maybe this research will ultimately help explain how it was possible to systematically murder such a large group of people without much violence resistance.

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance? Not surprisingly, the ghetto appears to be the relevant "stage" (looking at the Holocaust as a process) for revolt. And even then, we're not talking about much. The Warsaw Uprising, the most significant instance of resistance, involved a few hundred partisans among a population of thousands. This new information makes me think, the ghetto was probably the most important stage of the process, allowing for the whole horrible thing to be, against all rational expectation, an "orderly affair."

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance? Not surprisingly, the ghetto appears to be the relevant "stage" (looking at the Holocaust as a process) for revolt. And even then, we're not talking about much. The Warsaw Uprising, the most significant instance of resistance, involved a few hundred partisans among a population of thousands. This new information makes me think, the ghetto was probably the most important stage of the process, allowing for the whole horrible thing to be, against all rational expectation, an "orderly affair."

 Manchu wrote:
I don't know that I would call the erosion of Jewish people's rights "slow" and even if that characterization made sense inside of the Reich, why would it have made sense to Jews living elsewhere?

I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but there is an ongoing debate (principally in Germany) between intentionalists, scholars who believe the Holocaust and Nazi goals more generally unfolded according to a "master plan" known by the Nazi leaders from the beginning, and structuralists/functionalists, who believe the Nazi system was too disorganized and chaotic to effectively pursue policy such that what did happen was the result of widely held pre-existing attitudes and goals.

It's really fascinating stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_versus_intentionalism

I wonder how this information will affect the debate.

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance? Not surprisingly, the ghetto appears to be the relevant "stage" (looking at the Holocaust as a process) for revolt. And even then, we're not talking about much. The Warsaw Uprising, the most significant instance of resistance, involved a few hundred partisans among a population of thousands. This new information makes me think, the ghetto was probably the most important stage of the process, allowing for the whole horrible thing to be, against all rational expectation, an "orderly affair."

 Mr. Burning wrote:
I was surprised at the seeming volume of camps ghettos and other industrialized killing centres, Staggered really. and I am pretty well read about this.

 sebster wrote:


The extermination camps are few, and very well known. Most of the work in the OP is really about documenting the number of ghettos.

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance?

 Palindrome wrote:
This isn't all that suprising to be honest.

 Seaward wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance?

Resist with what?

 LordofHats wrote:

 Palindrome wrote:
This isn't all that suprising to be honest.

This. How is it new? Anyone read in the Holocaust knows that the focus on major camps and ghetto's within popular media has largely shadowed the full scale of the Holocaust. This strikes me more as a "we want to remind people about this" than a "we totally had no idea it was like this" announcement.

 Seaward wrote:
Resist with what?

 sebster wrote:
Uh, with the firearms they actually resisted with.

Once the scope of what was happening became clear and resistance cells formed, access to firearms was never the problem. I mean, there was a war going on. There were partisan rebels in the occupied countries, with weapons being supplied by either the Soviets or the Western powers. Anyone that wanted to join the resistance that couldn't get his hands on weaponry was likely just a danger to the cause.

 Bromsy wrote:
Yeah, that was the thing that really jumped out at me, they ought to break those numbers down a bit more specifically before they go spouting off about this... Now I'm going to have at least three or so of my facebook friends posting about how there were OMG 40000 DEATH CAMPS! Sigh.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 Palindrome wrote:
This isn't all that suprising to be honest.

This. How is it new? Anyone read in the Holocaust knows that the focus on major camps and ghetto's within popular media has largely shadowed the full scale of the Holocaust. This strikes me more as a "we want to remind people about this" than a "we totally had no idea it was like this" announcement.

Well according to the article this IS new information, not that the final solution was massive, the sheer SCALE of it across occupied Europe and Germany proper.

 LordofHats wrote:
And I'm saying that either the people conducting this research don't read the literature on the Holocaust (which I doubt) or they're doing what most historical institutions do, which is exaggerate the significance of their finds in order to present a better case for patronage. While I don't think anyone has ever set out to document every single facility involved in the holocaust, that there were hundreds to thousands of them all across Europe is not new information and hasn't been for at least 30 years. Only an amateur with no inkling of knowledge on the subject would need them to repeat these numbers.

EDIT: Really the news here isn't that all these facilities are being 'discovered' but that someone finally has the time and resources to go through all of them.

 Manchu wrote:
Sure ... ? All I meant was, how do you take 6 million people, deprive them of their property, split of families, get them to work to death, or simply march into gas chambers -- and there's not a single effective instance of violent resistance? Not surprisingly, the ghetto appears to be the relevant "stage" (looking at the Holocaust as a process) for revolt. And even then, we're not talking about much. The Warsaw Uprising, the most significant instance of resistance, involved a few hundred partisans among a population of thousands. This new information makes me think, the ghetto was probably the most important stage of the process, allowing for the whole horrible thing to be, against all rational expectation, an "orderly affair."