New York – Results from ongoing research being conducted by the United States Holocaust Museum has dramatically broadened the scope of Nazi atrocities committed during the Holocaust, leaving even veteran Holocaust historians shocked.
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Today’s NEW YORK TIMES (http://bit.ly/YHyXFj) reports that researchers have so far cataloged over 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning Nazi-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany during Hitler’s reign from 1933 to 1945.
The documentation, previewed at an academic forum in January at the German Historical Institute in Washington, stunned leading Holocaust researchers in attendance.
“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” said Hartmut Bergoff, director of the institute. “We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the numbers are unbelievable.”
The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, 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 forced into having sex with German military personnel.
While death camps like Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the stream of public consciousness, they represent only a ‘miniscule’ fraction of the entire Nazi network, the new research reveals.
New maps, created by the researchers, turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture, and slavery.
Lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, included data from some 400 contributors, and now estimate that between 15 and 20 million people died or were imprisoned over the course of Nazi occupation.
Their findings are published as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.
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 to 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,000.
The shocking numbers include: 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 informed, performing abortions, and ‘Germanizing’ prisoners.
Dr. Dean said the findings leave no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the wide-spread Nazi abuse at the time.
“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” said Dean. “They were everywhere.”
Does this come as a complete surprise to anyone? We always knew the nazis down graded the number they murdered, true we never thought 15-20 million, but then again they don’t say that those were the numbers killed. As for the Germans not knowing anything that happened, or any other country under that regime, we always knew that was a blatant lie. After all, how is it that they didn’t know anything when regularly their Jewish neighbors were taken out of school, work or even their homes?!
“… now estimate that between 15 and 20 million people died or were imprisoned over the course of Nazi occupation.”
That must mean Jews and l’havdil goyim combined. There weren’t 20 million Jews in the whole world by 1930s.
The ugly scar that the german and it’s allies left on this earth will last until the end of time. The german will always be remembered for one thing and that is its wholesale cold blooded slaughter of millions of innocent Yidden and others. To those who think that driving a german made car makes them k’nockers, hope you sleep well at night in your summer homes in Deal and Lakewood.
Actually, the 15 to 20 million number is not in contradiction to 6 million Jews murdered (although that number is probably an underestimate).
They are discussing the total number of PEOPLE, not davka Yidden, that went through some sort of camp, even POWs, and not all of them died.
There were no concentration camps in Ukraine.The jews were killed within first few days when germans were taking the cities, towns, villages.
The historians are saying that 35,000 jews were killed in Babiy Yar.
This number is not true.Within first few days 70,000 were killed.The rest that did not go to Babiy Yar were killed during the occupation of Kiev. The appr. number is 30,000. Total 100,000 in Babiy Yar.All jews in Ukraine were killed, it mostly, women, children, old people. Man were in the Army and Jewish polulation was not evacuated.Also, jews did not know that jermans were killing the Jews in Europe and did not evacuate .
The Uktainians were happy to help jermans with killng and identifying members of jewish population.
They took their property.
Your Headline read: “New Research Reveals Holocaust Worse Than Originally Thought”
After what my mother o”h and my father told me, nothing could be ‘worse’ then what happened to Yidden and some goyim during the Holocaust.
You could say that “There were more death camps and torture camps than previously noted”