The Warsaw Ghetto, during the Uprising.
Speaking of storm troopers, here’s something on the opposite end of the gravity spectrum from my last post…
This, brought to my attention by Stan Dubinsky, sort of blew my mind this morning:
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…
Just to give you a little perspective: There are fewer than 17,000 Starbucks stores in the world, about 11,100 in this country. When you consider that there’s pretty much one on every block in Manhattan, that makes 42,500 all that much more staggering.
At the risk of sounding like a Holocaust denier, a number like that strains credulity. Of course, we’re talking about more than the genocide of Jews, but the whole Nazi murder machine, including homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and member of other groups.
But still… Are there even that many cities in that part of Europe?
One thing seems for sure… it becomes harder and harder to believe that anyone in Germany or the “Greater Reich” didn’t have some idea of what was going on.
Related Posts
I’m 40 minutes from the nearest Starbucks, which has been there for 2 years. Before that, if I wanted Starbucks, it was a 90 minute drive to Columbia.
So depending on how these things were dispersed, it could be that some people never saw them. Of course, that just mean that others had that many more in their area.
Another point that occurs to me… if there were that many such locations, how on Earth did the Germans stave off defeat as long as they did? Think of all the troops that ties down, guarding people in that many different locations…
… a classic case of ideology trumping practicality…
Suspect data it sounds to me. Not to deminimize the horror of the reality then; but still, sounds like counting train cars and street corners. There is no reason to overbash unspeakable evil. And there remains no reason to forget.
The number does sound high, but the report points out that study isn’t just talking about high profile concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. It also includes “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.”
When one considers all these different types of facilities and the vast territory that was under Nazi control, the figure seems somewhat more plausible, though still astounding.
The total in the article includes “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 infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.” Some of these were temporary, which would boost the totals. A number of factories/industrial complexes had their won forced labor camps, as did research sites such as Peenemunde. Some could be very small–the article cites an individual home as using forced labor. A survivor quoted in the article spent time in five different camps and was in the course of being moved to a sixth when he was liberated. So the numbers begin to make sense for an empire that stretched from the Bay of Biscay deep into European Russia, from Norway in the north to the Caucasus and Crete in the south.