Hard to miss: Researchers document 42,500 Nazi camps and ghettos

In 2011 an American "historian", Alfred de Zayas, published a book - Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis ("Genocide as State Secret") - in which he claimed that hardly any Germans had any knowledge of the Holocaust, that the mass murder of Jews was ordered and carried out by a small cadre of SS officers, largely in camps in Poland, hidden away from the Germans in the Reich. Besides, de Zayas argues in his book, Hitler ordered (Führerbefehls Nr. 1 vom 11) that "Final Solution" should be carried out in strict secrecy.  De Zaya's book was celebrated as a "breakthrough" by ultra-right-wing publications such as Junge Freiheit in Germany, and by white supremacist publications in the US.  Reputable historians of the Third Reich such as Peter Longerich and Frank Bejohr have convincingly shown in their work that, in fact, knowledge of mass murder by the Nazis was widely known among the populace.

Now, a group of American researchers has documented that Germans were exposed to thousands of camps, ghettos, and killing centers (Tötungsanstalten), often located in their home towns - 3,000 sites in Berlin alone, and 1,300 in Hamburg. 

The exhaustive documentation work was carried out by the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC: 

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.

The majority of these camps and ghettos were located in Germany and Poland (see map). In other words, virtually in the back yards or down the street from tens of millions of German citizens:

Die enorme Zahl macht allerdings eines deutlich, in den Worten des Projektleiters Martin Dean: „Man konnte in Deutschland buchstäblich nirgendwo hingehen, ohne auf Zwangsarbeitslager oder KZs zu stoßen. Sie waren überall.“ Insofern unterstreichen die Forschungen des Museums, was mittlerweile in der historischen Forschung auch durch zahlreiche Zeitzeugenberichte belegt ist, dass nämlich die Kenntnis der Terror- und Vernichtungspolitik der Nazis im Deutschen Reich allgemein war. Und zwar nicht allein gegenüber Juden, sondern auch beispielsweise gegenüber den 3,3 Millionen sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen. Die überall im Einsatz befindlichen, insgesamt bis zu zwölf Millionen Zwangsarbeiter aus ganz Europa waren ohnehin ein jedermann bekannter Anblick.

(The huge number makes one thing clear, as one of the project leaders Martin dean noted: "There was literally nowhere in Germany where one could go without running into a concentration camp or forced labor camp. They were everywhere."  The research carried out by the museum thus validates what historians and newspaper reports confirmed, namely, that knowledge of the terror and extermination policies of the Nazis in the German Reich was widespread.  And not solely against the Jews, but also, for example, 3.3 million Soviet POWs. In any case, the 12 million forced laborers from all over Europe were a common sight.)

Comments

[jabgoe]

when i was a kid and learning about the nazi history of germany in school i asked my dear grandmother how such atrocities could have happened in a civilised country. she had been a young adult at that time and could not have missed the nazis' crimes if they had been as obvious as my schoolbook tried to tell me. she claimed that nobody had known anything about the extermination camps. it had all happened in secrecy and nobody could have known anything. well, when i asked her later if she hadn't noticed that her jewish neighbours were disapearing and lots of other people were vanishing she said that nobody dared to object or interfere because then you ended up in a concentration camp. she strictly refused to admit the contradiction of her two statements and after some time comletely refused to talk about this period.

[erphschwester]

ich erinnere mich, dass meine mutter im jahr ihres todes nach jahrzehnten der sprachlosigkeit dies erzählte: eine ihrer besseren freundinnen, jüdin, "verschwand" von einem tag auf den anderen aus der schule. mutters mutter wusste wochenlang zu vermeiden, dass sie sich auf den weg zur freundin begab um nachzufragen. eines tages dann traf man sich auf der straße. mutter wollte erfreut auf die freundin zu stürzen, wurde aber kraftvoll von ihrer mutter zurück gehalten. ihr verzweifelter blick erfasste die freundin, die ebenfalls mit dem kopf schüttelte, besorgt, ehe sie sich abwandte, als wäre nichts gewesen.
beide waren 15.

[Steve]

This 'research' says little that we did not know. It counts sites where as few as ten or so forced-laborers were located, and equates them to places like Auschwitz in terms of the total count. It is essentially meaningless. A similar count for Japan or the USSR would amount also to a vast total. The actual number of killing locations and victims remains essentially unchanged. What's more, prisoners were not permitted to mix with the general population (and vice-versa), beyond what was required for their work, so at most civilians would occasionally see some prisoners doing labor - they certainly were not permitted to observe the execution sites in action.

And as I have addressed in detail before, this statement "knowledge of mass murder by the Nazis was widely known among the populace" is highly misleading and categorically false. I know Germans who had no clue of mass murder, and even someone as distinguished and connected as Helmut Schmidt has said he did not either. It was never covered in the media, and was indeed classified as a state secret. Of course rumors leaked out, but only to some, and most could confirm nothing. On the other hand the mass murder they generally witnessed was at the hands of the Allies.

It is quite extraordinary to see people who consider themselves of German extraction or relation so keen to indict the Germans for what most patently could have had no solid idea of if at all, let alone do anything about, and at the same time ignore the similar 'guilt' of other peoples at that time and others, and play directly into the widepread narrative of Supreme German Evil, whilst practically equivalent crimes such as those of the Soviets go largely unknown and undiscussed by comparison, except among limited scholarly circles (see eg Naimark's Stalin's Genocides). As Nick Turse has recently helped show, even nations such as the US have engaged in widepread massacre and war crime since WW2 (Kill Anything that Moves - The Real American War in Vietnam), apart from earlier cases such as the genocide (openly advocated at the time) of the American Indians, also at the hands of the ruthless Conquistadors (see eg Bartolome de las Casas), which exceeded the Holocaust in scale, and massive colonial atrocities by the British French Belgians Dutch and others, which also killed tens of millions often with the utmost brutality and callousness.

What happened under the Nazis was indeed bad and criminal, but it is also bad and even criminal to use it to cover up or excuse the even greater crimes (in total) committed by numerous other regimes before and since, whether by accident or design.

[David]

Interesting that the recent made-for-television series "Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter" deals precisely with the participation by the Wehrmacht and other ordinary Germans in atrocities on the Eastern Front. The series resonated with millions of German viewers and is one of the most-watched programs in the history of Germany TV. (I haven't seen it - hopefully it will become available on Netflix).