42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe

It is a pity that the Europeans have not done this type of research themselves.  Even the famous tennis stadium Roland Garros in Paris was turned into a provisional camp for the detention of 'undesirable aliens'.  Arthur Koestler [photo] was detained there for a week with 500 other European 'undesirables' treated as the 'scum of the earth' and, according to Koestler, compared to other places of detention he experienced it "could almost be called pleasant": "Our grotto, or den, had no windows; our roof was the underside of one of the grandstands, ascending over us in a slope of 45 degrees; our bed was the concrete floor, with a thin layer of straw on it. The straw was damp, as the roof leaked at the junctures of the steps; only half of us had our own blankets and the camp did not provide any; and we lay so closely packed together that many preferred what we called the 'sardine system': head between the two neighbours' feet, in order to avoid mixing the breath." Scum of the Earth, Eland, p.p. 72-73.

Eric Lichtblau @ New York Times (The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking)

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.) [...]