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The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 05:01am
by fgalkin
The NYT
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.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”

The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.

“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Eric Lichtblau is a reporter for The New York Times in Washington and a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 06:43am
by K. A. Pital
It was pretty much common knowledge when I was at school that Nazis set up a ghetto in almost every major town they occupied; however, the numbers are really huge.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 08:24am
by Thanas
Yeah, this is something that has been known and suspected for a while, not to the general public though.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 08:29am
by Broomstick
Can't say I'm entirely shocked.

I think a lot of the populations near all these camps/ghettos/etc. chose not to see the suffering, just as people choose not to see suffering today, only with more intensity. After all, bringing attention to the homeless or crime victims or whatever isn't nearly as likely to get you shot as trying to rouse feeling against Nazi practices in Nazi-occupied Europe. People have a remarkable capacity to edit out what they don't want to see, even more so when it's a survival trait. Yes, they should have known, they undoubtedly did know on a certain level, but they denied that knowledge. Reprehensible? Yes, arguably, on the other hand we should realize that that is also very common human behavior, especially in times like war. Everyone knows that Horrible Things are happening on the other side of the barbed wire, the wall, in the next room but they don't want to know the details. They distract themselves from the screams and moans with something else, and tell themselves the mounds of bodies were killed by disease or bombs rather than torture or systematic deprivation. Cattle cars of people being pulled along those railroad tracks, going somewhere but always returning empty the other way? Don't look at them - look at the flowers in the field, they are so much less upsetting, and for god's sake do nothing to endanger your family, deny whatever you have to in order to keep them safe and at home.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 12:16pm
by CaptHawkeye
The real kicker is when apologists try to discount the crimes of the Nazis by bringing up Allied war crime red herrings.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-02 10:34pm
by Sea Skimmer
That's what will happen when you make slavery and murder entirely integral to your war economy. As implied by the article, many sites would have been single buildings attached to say, large farm or one of the countless dispersed industrial workshops the Germans setup once bombing started hurting them. This also means the number of guards involved had to be much larger then earlier estimates, since the required guard count per prisoner goes down considerably with large camps.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 12:06am
by Zwinmar
Which brings a new theory as to why Germans were so silent about it after the war

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 07:18am
by Thanas
Which is?

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 10:44am
by Dr. Trainwreck
Thanas wrote:Which is?
The postwar theory that Germans as a people were distinct from the Nazis. It would be harder to sell if the world knew that every village had its own slave encampment.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 10:51am
by Thanas
Dr. Trainwreck wrote:
Thanas wrote:Which is?
The postwar theory that Germans as a people were distinct from the Nazis. It would be harder to sell if the world knew that every village had its own slave encampment.
Well, that theory is not advanced in the field anymore since at least twenty years or so and already had been severely challenged since the 60s, if not earlier. Nowadays the focus is more on what changed Germany from the somewhat tolerant Empire society (which actually had a larger integration of jews and non-ethnic germans than any other state in Europe had in comparison) to the Nazi society which was the opposite in most aspects but had some continuity in other viewpoints previously existing (authoritarian etc) under the empire.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 12:38pm
by Dr. Trainwreck
It's out of use now. When it still was in use, it was a justification for reconstructing Germany and not just razing all the factories and leaving the place full of cattle and farmers.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 02:10pm
by Thanas
Dr. Trainwreck wrote:It's out of use now. When it still was in use, it was a justification for reconstructing Germany and not just razing all the factories and leaving the place full of cattle and farmers.
It hardly is a new theory, which is what my point was.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 04:03pm
by Zwinmar
What a Historian current in the field recognizes and what the general populace of any given area recognizes are two separate, and in many cases, diametrically opposed ideas. In many cases the indigenous population around the slave labor camps were complicit with the ongoing depredation of the human species, however, one must keep in mind that humans have the ability to rationalize away anything unpleasant if it is in their own best interest to do so.

The forceful recognition of despicable acts such as the Holocaust will be met with denial and shame because of their grotesque nature, except of course, in outlying cases. This is where the historian and the average person differs; in many cases a historian is more interested in what really happened and the human consequences, as well as the myriad of other considerations that go into a specific area of study. While the 'average person' only cares how such a situation effects them.

Hope I made that clear Thanas, probably not but...

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-03-03 06:33pm
by Thanas
Zwinmar wrote:What a Historian current in the field recognizes and what the general populace of any given area recognizes are two separate, and in many cases, diametrically opposed ideas. In many cases the indigenous population around the slave labor camps were complicit with the ongoing depredation of the human species, however, one must keep in mind that humans have the ability to rationalize away anything unpleasant if it is in their own best interest to do so.

The forceful recognition of despicable acts such as the Holocaust will be met with denial and shame because of their grotesque nature, except of course, in outlying cases. This is where the historian and the average person differs; in many cases a historian is more interested in what really happened and the human consequences, as well as the myriad of other considerations that go into a specific area of study. While the 'average person' only cares how such a situation effects them.

Hope I made that clear Thanas, probably not but...
I think you and I are talking pretty much talking past each other and I am not getting your point, really. If you are saying that the average person denied the holocaust/blamed it on a few nazis because he saw something or might even have been complicit in it, then no surprise there. But that is not a new theory as you posited above and as I already said.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-22 12:50am
by Saxtonite
Dr. Trainwreck wrote:
Thanas wrote:Which is?
The postwar theory that Germans as a people were distinct from the Nazis. It would be harder to sell if the world knew that every village had its own slave encampment.
Hmm? A lot of anti-partisan/anti-jew operations were done by LOCAL nationalists though, i.e. Ajaris Kommando and some members of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. It doesn't exactly change the argument of implication of all German peoples much to find this information out given a lot of the actions in the East were not exactly German directed (i.e. Ustashe in NDH/Independent State of Croatia)

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-22 03:04pm
by Dr. Trainwreck
Huh? I know some of the worst crimes were committed by local collaborators. Maybe my argument isn't the best out there and I don't really think I phrased it correctly, but I was talking about Germans.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-24 12:09pm
by Saxtonite
Dr. Trainwreck wrote:Huh? I know some of the worst crimes were committed by local collaborators. Maybe my argument isn't the best out there and I don't really think I phrased it correctly, but I was talking about Germans.
Right, but revealing that the the concentration camp system was larger does not exactly blame the German people more due to those various nationalist movements. Most of the resettlement, etc was to the East so the German civilians were legitimately ignorant, but did get rumors passed around because filtration gets back even with 'utter secrecy' the SS were under.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-24 08:53pm
by Broomstick
That, and some people escaped the camps, or the trains on the way there. Not huge numbers, but enough to start letting people know what was going on.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-25 04:47am
by PeZook
The Holocaust was more than just the camps, though. It also involved direct murder, deliberate starvation of populations, repressions and torture.

A lot of witnesses existed of those events ; Remember, too, that it wasn't exactly a secret that German Jews were being deported and their property seized en masse. SS men would take pictures of themselves standing over the grill pits of Treblinka, soldiers could be often seen casually strolling through the Warsaw Ghetto like tourists, etc.

Re: The Holocaust: Much Bigger Than We Thought

Posted: 2013-07-25 05:38am
by Thanas
It is not even just the camps or Ghettos in the east. Every German citizen would at least have heard about the expulson/concentration/deportation of his Jewish neighbours. Unlike in Eastern European countries where some Ghettos already existed, almost all German jews lived among the non-Jewish population at least to some degree, a result of integration measures done by the Prussian state as well as Progroms being virtually unheard of since the thirty years wars.

What is so shocking about the holocaust to me is not just the scale, but also how a pseudo-ethnic group (and lets face it, the category of jew and non-jew had been blurred since the 1830s at least) can go from having candidates in the highest offices of the land (Ministers, bankers, officers etc.) to being personae non gratae in less than two or three years.