Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites

This site features an interactive map of central Nazi camps and murder sites during the Holocaust. To view a certain encyclopedia entry, simply click on the name of the site on the map, or the relevant link in the list below. A collection of related items including video testimonies, research papers and photographs is also featured.

Overview

From the September 1939, until Summer 1941, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered under German occupation. Shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis introduced a plan for the systematic murder of European Jewry known as "the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem". Beginning on June 22, 1941, death squads (Einsatzgruppen) consisting of SS and German police, in conjunction with German army units, began the systematic annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union - at first mainly men, but later women and children too. In the southern regions of the occupied Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by Romanian army units. In Autumn 1941, the systematic murder of Jews began in Yugoslavia. Alongside the death squads there were cases where local collaborators also took part in the killing. Meanwhile, the Nazis began planning to extend their annihilation policy to additional areas throughout Europe. In December 1941, the first extermination camp, Chelmno, began operation. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Western Poland (the Wartegau, which had been annexed to Germany) were murdered there.

The Wannsee Conference held in Berlin in January 1942 served as a milestone in the evolution of the “Final Solution”. Senior Nazi officials discussed the implementation of the "Final Solution” in Nazi-occupied Europe with various agencies coordinating actions in order to set it in motion.
Three extermination camps were built in the Generalgouvernement (occupied Poland): Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. It was in these extermination camps that the vast majority of Polish Jews were murdered during 1942 and the first months of 1943, as well as Jews of other European nationalities. In late 1943, Jews from these regions who had survived the previous deportations were sent to their death, primarily to the Majdanek extermination camp.

Beginning in 1942, Jews from all over Europe were deported to various concentration and extermination camps. The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex became the primary site for the annihilation of European Jewry after the other extermination camps had been closed. Deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau reached their peak in Summer 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, Slovakia, and particularly Hungary were murdered there. By 1945, the surviving inmates of Nazi camps were subjected to “Death Marches”. These marches were the mass evacuation of prisoners from Poland and the Baltic states to Germany due to the Red Army’s advance. Due to harsh weather conditions, random shootings, and physical weakness from years of abuse in the camps, approximately 250,000 victims perished during the forced marches, an estimated 65-85,000 of them Jews.
The camp system and killing sites remain a chilling testament to the methodological and calculated planning, and sometimes brutally chaotic execution, of the Nazis hope to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth.

Related Links:

For a Selection of resources about the Final Solution, Click Here

For Photographs relating to the Final Solution, Click Here

Testimonies:

From the Testimony of Hilde Sherman about the Deportation to Riga and the Arrival to the Ghetto
From the Testimony of Don Krausz about Life in Westerbork Under the Shadow of Transports
From the Testimony of Yaacov Schwartzberg about Lithuanians and Germans Working Together to Capture and Murder Jews at Ponar, Lithuania
From the Testimony of Alex Feuer about the Arrival and First Selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau
From the Testimony of Laura Varon about the Fate of Her Family in Auschwitz-Birkenau
From the Testimony of Jeanne Levy About the First Time She Heard that People are being Gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau
From The Testimony of Sima Katz who was taken to Ponary and escaped
From the Testimony of Alice Meroudas Describing an Aktzia in Lvov, 1942

For more Testimonies, click here

Video Testimonies:

Research

The Historian Bogdan Musial about the Decision to Murder the Jews in the Generalgouvernement
The Historian Yitzhak Arad on ''Operation Reinhard''
No Anonymous Desk Murderers, David Silberklang about Bogdan Musial’s Book
The Historian Dieter Pohl about Hans Kruger and the Murder of Jews in Stanislawow Region
The ''Final Solution'' – A Bureaucratic Process or an Ideological Genocide? – An Interview with Prof. Yehuda Bauer
'Ordinary Men' or 'Ordinary Germans' - An Interview with Prof. Christpher Browning

For more Research, Click Here

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