According to an article in the June 4 Washington Post, (abstracted here), more than 20,000 Nazi concentration camps have been documented in a year of research for a multi-volume encyclopedia on the subject. This is three to four times as many as the most assiduous scholars had estimated and will probably reshape public understanding of the scope of the Holocaust. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933-1945 is the first major reference work on the Holocaust since Perestroika opened many European archives, providing more reference material than was possible to coordinate and catalog in the past. The first volume, scheduled for publication in June 2009, focuses only on camps run by the SS. There were very few "secret" camps; most of the sites in the encyclopedia were known, but each only to a couple of scholars who had researched the information on that particular site. The enormous number of sites now documented--often with photos and/or maps--reveals that for every well-known camp like Dachau or Bergen-Belsen there were dozens more. Each of the 23 main camps had a hierarchy of sub-camps. Some of the newly discovered camps were not set up for executing prisoners. There were "care facilities for foreign children" where pregnant prisoners underwent forced abortions. There were "Germanization" camps where foreign youth with desirable racial features were indoctrinated. There were "youth protection camps" for rebellious German adolescents who listened to jazz music. Nonetheless the primary mission of the network of camps was the Holocaust, with such "rehabilitation" being only a footnote. The book reveals a complex ecology of coordinated devastation and will make it impossible to think of the activities that took place in the camps as an aberration. One of the lingering protestations surrounding the Holocaust is that ordinary people knew nothing about the killing underway in their own locales. It turns out that most towns had some sort of prison or holding area where people were victimized. This shatters the mythology that it took place out of sight of the average person. There was only one Auschwitz and one Treblinka, but there were 20,000 camps spread throughout the rest of Europe. This project shows that all of Europe was a camp.
That's extraordinary--they're going to have to essentially rewrite the history of Nazi Germany to take account of the new information.
Don't forget that history is being altered now. In textbooks, in media, through words, to suit political agendas.
Britain has well over 4000 "sites of special scientific interest" . . . if fact, it has none that I know of that are not special . . . indicating a clear misunderstanding of the word "special"! Likewise, how concentrated can 20,000 concentration camps be? The use of the word "concentration" is absurd when applied to as few as a dozen or a score of people.
AFAIK, "concentration" is our word, coined by English-language writers when the large camps like Dachau were liberated at the end of the war and the average American was introduced to the depth of depravity of the Nazi government. Those camps were huge, so it was a reasonable coinage. At that time, and in fact up until this study was launched in 2008, most people outside the Nazi-occupied countries did not know about the smaller camps, almost none of us knew that their number went into four digits, and literally none of us knew that it actually went into five digits. I wouldn't be surprised if new terminology is developed, with the resurgence of prominence of the Holocaust research and publicity while there are still living survivors to interview. I have no idea what the German term was, or if they even had one. In official documents of course they referred to them specifically as "care facilities for foreign children," etc. They didn't go out of their way to publicize the fact that they were executing civilians, many (most?) of whom were German citizens. Even in wartime, even when a population has been carefully manipulated into a panic based on fear and hatred, there are things that most of them would just rather not know about. "Concentration camp" would have been a good term for the "relocation camps" for Japanese-Americans. There weren't very many of them, they were fairly large, and their purpose was to concentrate the target population into groups where their behavior and communication could be easily monitored and where they were isolated from potential targets of sabotage or sedition. Concentration was not the purpose of the Nazi camps. That was an incidental stage in the extermination program. Sensibilities were more delicate back in those days. My mother's family in Bohemia (we call it the Czech Republic now because it's easier to spell) lost a few members to the genocidal impulses of the German occupiers. One pair of my father's grandparents were Jewish by ancestry if not by culture so he surely had relatives he couldn't name who died in Nazi camps. The WWII generation simply wasn't ready to face what had been going on in Germany. It's been many years now since the American press has adopted the stark term "death camps," but my parents could not have stomached it. I absentmindedly use the term "concentration camp" because it was the one I grew up with... and perhaps because the truth is not so easy for me to stomach either. Those people who died are nothing more than abstractions to me... but some of them were my cousins.
