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The Nazis Established 42,500 Installations Where Some 20 Million People were Held and Murdered
By R. Hofner
Researchers from the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. who have been working on the first map of its kind on behalf of the U.N., demarcating the incinerating installations and all detention and concentration camps set up by the Nazis, were surprised to discover 42,500 such camps where between 15 and 20 million people were tortured and killed during WWII, Jews and non-Jews alike. These include tens of thousands of places which were heretofore unknown. These harsh figures shed light on the enormous scope of the Nazi murder machine.
The new project, which was begun 13 years ago, managed to astound even expert historians. The aim was to present an all encompassing picture of the systematic genocide, not according to a geographical or political division as has been prevalent up till now, but more as an overall view. The encyclopedia which they created about the Nazi camps and ghettos is being published in stages by the museum and is expected to be completed by 2025.
The uniqueness of this research lies in its identification of thousands of sites as culled from hundreds of different sources, and positioning them with geographic precision and accuracy. At first, the researchers, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, expected find about 7,000 concentration, forced labor, detention and death camps, all serving the Nazis. This was the number that historians had agreed upon over the years.
They were thoroughly shocked when, in the course of their work, the number swelled to the unbelievable figure of no less than 42,500 camps created between 1933-1945, of which 30,000 were hard labor camps, 1,150 ghettos for Jews, 980 concentration camps, 1,000 prisoner camps and hundreds of others which served as death centers for the aged and the crippled. "You could not travel through Germany without encountering a forced labor camp, a concentration or a war prisoner camp," said Dean. "They were everywhere!"
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