New Shoah research

Editorial

A new study indicates that the Holocaust was perpetrated on a larger and even more systematic scale than we had known.

Researchers working with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., have spent the past 13 years compiling a compendium of all known forced labor sites, ghettos, detention facilities and concentration camps that are considered the infrastructure of the Holocaust. Researchers include prisoner-of-war camps and so-called “care” centres, where forced abortions or infanticides were perpetrated, and brothels, where women were forced into sex with Nazi military personnel.

The team of 400 scholars had earlier cited 20,000 as the number of Holocaust-related sites. Their new research, which stunned them and apparently all students of the Holocaust, concludes that there were more than 42,500 institutions involved in the Final Solution. Of these, 30,000 were camps, or military and industrial facilities, where slave labor was employed. The research estimates between 15 and 20 million people died in such facilities.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is working on the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, a project that has seen two volumes published with a further five expected in the next dozen years, under project director Geoffrey Megargee. The data were presented at a conference in January but, while it caused waves in the research community, it seems to have attracted general attention only when the New York Times reported it a week ago.

The details of the Holocaust’s enormity, the complicity of millions of Europeans, and our knowledge of the indescribable brutality experienced by the victims, have always raised unanswerable questions about how such a thing could occur. This question has been lingering now for seven decades and we do not necessarily expect a satisfactory answer, since we are dealing with issues of human behavior in some of the most extreme situations history has chronicled.

What is shocking in this new research, perhaps above all, is that we apparently did not comprehend the magnitude of the Holocaust’s infrastructure. It is one thing to know and grudgingly accept that we may never understand the psychosocial causes of the Holocaust. It is shocking to discover that we had so massively underestimated such a quantifiable aspect like how many physical sites were involved in the systematic process of extermination.

While this new research opens new windows of understanding, it also raises new questions about our ignorance. There is that which we may never understand, but we still, apparently, do not know all there is to know about what we can find out, even to the point of, until now, underestimating by more than half the number of physical sites in the infrastructure of the Shoah. This should raise serious questions about our willingness, as a society, to dig into this topic. And it brings to mind other research, done a few years ago, about European attitudes toward the Holocaust.

Public opinion surveys indicate that many Europeans believe there is too much talk about the Holocaust. Near-majority levels of respondents in Switzerland, Spain, Austria, France and Italy expressed this view to opinion pollsters. Yet this is incongruous with the startlingly high numbers of respondents in these same countries who say they have never heard of the Holocaust – especially among the young, where the numbers who claim no knowledge of the Holocaust were as high or higher than those who said there was too much talk about it.

So, in Europe, and probably in North America too, huge numbers of people have never heard of the Holocaust and huge numbers say we are talking about it too much. In reality, from the perspective of its historical magnitude, and the moral and sociological mysteries associated with it, we have not finished discussing the Holocaust – we have barely even begun.

Dedicating ourselves to understanding the Holocaust, its predicates and meanings, to the best of human capability, and rededicating ourselves as Jews and as human beings to the concept of “Never again,” is not an act that must be undertaken for the benefit of the Jewish people, or even as an act of contrition by the German people. It is a necessary commitment all people should make to the future of human civilization.

A decade ago, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust expert and ethicist, spoke here at the community Kristallnacht commemorative lecture and said of the Holocaust, “Something of almost biblical proportions has happened.”

Just as there are events in Torah that remain the subject of talmudic disputation to this day, we expect that the Holocaust will be explored for millennia to come as a challenge to every civilized nation to address some of the biggest ethical issues facing humanity. The new research shows us we are not nearly done with this topic.

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