Holocaust Remembrance: A Commitment to Truth and Lest We Forget

From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime and its allies created approximately 44,000 sites to confine Jews, political prisoners, POWs, Roma and Sinti, and many others. The map above shows 4,231 locations with one or more sites, including those in North Africa – less than 10% of the total estimated by 2023 by researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. All camps and ghettos in the maps were established by the German forces or Axis-aligned powers. The camps shown in North Africa were established by occupation forces.

Camps (orange dots) could be the size of a city or a single building. Wehrmacht sites (black dots), like some camps, held both POWs and civilians. Ghettos (purple dots) could fill a Jewish neighbourhood or be just a field or barn. At the six SS death camps (red squares – Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka), millions of civilians were murdered, often immediately upon arrival.

Whatever their form, these places collectively held millions of people against their will in brutal, inhumane conditions.

Disclaimer: The designations employed, including geographical names, and the presentation of the materials in the present publication, including the citations, maps and bibliography, do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the United Nations concerning the names and legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries and do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

Credit: Present-day physical geography data courtesy of Natural Earth. Projection: Europe Albers Equal Area Conic. Main map and graph by Maja Kruse and Anne Kelly Knowles, 2024. Copyright Anne Kelly Knowles and Maja Kruse. Map of Auschwitz complex and subcamps by Maja Kruse, 2024. Copyright Maja Kruse. This map was originally developed for Sarah Cushman’s forthcoming book, Women in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz camp system

The concentration camp known as Auschwitz has long been a symbol of the Holocaust in its entirety. What many people do not realize is that “Auschwitz” was in fact a complex of three main camps as well as a system of several dozen subcamps. Nor do many know that this system was one of many camp and ghetto systems that in total spanned the width and breadth of Europe. What the Germans called the Auschwitz “Zone of Interest” (Interessengebiet) lay between the Soła and Vistula rivers. It was centered on Auschwitz I, a concentration camp that opened in January 1940 near the Polish town of Oswieçim. (The Nazis cleared the town of its Polish residents to isolate the camp.) The 25-squaremile zone included Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where the Nazis murdered approximately one million Jews and thousands of Romani people, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a site intended to manufacture synthetic rubber for industry and the military. At these three main camps and six local subcamps, shown above, tens of thousands of prisoners labored and struggled to survive, including men, women, and children from across Europe: Jews, Romani, political prisoners, Soviet POWs, and German “anti-social” prisoners. The small map in the bottom left shows the location of all 39 subcamps in the Auschwitz system. No still map can convey the dynamism of this system. During the early 1940s it was constantly expanding, adding new sites, structures, purposes, and prisoner populations. These changes reflected the shifting priorities of war and genocide.

Both prisoner experiences and the places they were held were incredibly varied. Some prisoners endured captivity for weeks, others for years; some were shunted from place to place. The sites did not all exist at once, and many facilities changed purpose and location over time.

Seeking Refuge

The Frank family: (left to right): Margot, Otto, Anne, and Edith Frank, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1941. Courtesy of the Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland.

The story of the Frank family illustrates the vulnerability of refugees seeking safety from the Nazis. Otto and Edith Frank and their two young daughters, Margot and Anneliese -Anne - left for Amsterdam, the Netherlands shortly after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

For a few years, it seemed the family would be safe. Otto grew increasingly worried about the stability of the region, and in 1938 applied to the United States for visas for his family. American restrictive immigration policies, and the changing events in Europe destroyed that hope. Germany attacked the Netherlands in 1940 and Otto’s visa applications were destroyed. Unable to leave, Otto created a hiding place in the secret annex of his business’s warehouse. The annex provided shelter for over two years for the Frank family, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer. They were betrayed in August 1944. Of those who had hidden in the annex, only Otto survived the Holocaust.

Ghettoization

Child in the Lodz ghetto, Poland, circa 1940–1944. Credit: Photograph by Mendel Grossman (1913-1945) who died on a death march, 30 April 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #24635, Courtesy of Moshe Zilbar, Source Record ID: Collections: 2005.214. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Our bread ration has been reduced and vegetables don’t arrive anymore. Hunger is ever more terrifying.”

– Dawid Sierakowiak, (1924–1943), entry dated 18 March 1942.

The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. 18 March 1942. Courtesy of Oxford University Press.

The start of the Second World War in September 1939 was a decisive moment in Nazi anti-Jewish policy. After the Germans conquered Eastern Europe, they concentrated Jews in restricted areas called ghettos; in western Europe they incarcerated Jews in transit camps.

Over 1,100 ghettos existed across Europe, with the largest in Poland. Most ghettos were situated on rail lines that facilitated later mass deportations to killing centers. In many ghettos, Jews sought to maintain vestiges of prewar life, despite squalid conditions. Nonetheless, conditions were a torturous means of annihilation through starvation, slave labour, disease, and executions.

Deportation

Germany and its racist allies began deporting Jews and Roma and Sinti from the ghettos and transit camps to killing centers that had been constructed in occupied Poland.

Rounding up the children from the Lodz ghetto, Poland, for deportation to the Chelmno death camp, Poland, September 1942. None of the children survived. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #50328. Courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jewish women and children from Subcarpathian Rus awaiting selection after arrival at Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Death Camp (1940-1945), May 1944. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #77255. Courtesy of Yad Vashem (Public Domain). Source Record ID: FA 268/055. Published Source: The Auschwitz Album – Peter Hellman, Random House. Copyright of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Anna Maria “Setella” Steinbach, a young Romani girl, stares out of a cattle car used for deportation from Westerbork transit camp, the Netherlands, 1944. Setella was murdered with her mother and siblings, in Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Death Camp (1940–1945). She was nine years old. Credit: Copyright Yad Vashem Photo Archives, Archival Signature 1475/30.

Systematic mass murder

Mass murder began in June 1941 with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. As German troops moved into the Soviet Union, mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) followed, massacring Jews in more than 1,500 villages and towns, often in broad daylight in the presence of local witnesses. Nazi policy now encompassed the implementation of the “Final Solution” the Nazi euphemism given for the policy of annihilation of Jewish children, women and men.

To murder more efficiently, the Germans created killing sites in occupied Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Death Camp (1940–1945). Most of the people deported to these sites were murdered by poison gas immediately upon arrival.

Portrait of four-year-old Malvina Babat and three-year-old Polina Babat, who were killed at the mass shootings at Babi Yar. c.1940-September 1941. Kiev, former USSR – now Ukraine. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Babi Yar Society. Copyright: Public Domain