New Study Reveals 42,500 Nazi Sites Operated Across Europe

by Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff

After a 13-year investigation, researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shock historians with scale of revelations • Sites include forced labor camps, ghettos, concentration camps, POW camps, brothels and forced abortion centers.

While the Auschwitz death camp (pictured) and the Warsaw Ghetto are particularly infamous symbols of the Holocaust, they represent only a fraction of the Nazi's network of destruction. | Photo credit: GettyImages

A comprehensive new study has revealed that the Nazis operated no fewer than 42,500 sites across Europe as part of their killing machine, leaving Holocaust historians shocked yet again by the scale of the revelations.

The 13-year investigation by researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which began in 2000, documents all the sites in Europe where the Nazis imprisoned, enslaved and tortured their victims between 1933 and 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 New York Times reported on Saturday. 

"The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought," institute director Hartmut Berghoff told The Times after learning of the new data. "We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the numbers are unbelievable." 

The researchers also struggled to comprehend the figures they calculated, saying they had expected to uncover 7,000 sites.

The data shows that 30,000 sites functioned as forced labor camps, 1,150 were ghettos, 980 were concentration camps, 1,000 were prisoner-of-war camps, 500 sites functioned as brothels "where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel," and several other sites were centers where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth.

While the Auschwitz concentration and death camp and the Warsaw Ghetto are particularly infamous symbols of the Holocaust, they and other large sites represent only a fraction of the Nazi's network of destruction.

According to The New York Times, "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."

Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=7659

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