The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

This volume illuminates the vast and lethal scope of Nazi racial persecution by documenting sites in which mostly non-Jewish victims suffered detention, punishment, and murder. Among those targeted as racially or biologically inferior were people with disabilities and hereditary illnesses, Sinti and Roma, and members of many other ethnic groups who came under German control over the course of World War II. The volume’s roughly 800 essays detail many of the police and security formations and the immense variety of punitive sites involved in the implementation of Nazi racial policy, including facilities for forced sterilization, so-called “euthanasia” centers, and other sites for the murder of institutionalized patients; sites in which foreign forced laborers suffered grueling physical abuse, involuntary abortions, and the murder of their children; camps for the detention and murder of Roma and Sinti; so-called “Germanization” facilities as well as transit and resettlement camps for violent population transfers in occupied territories. Often improvised and short-lived, the facilities that served the Nazis’ forcible restructuring of European populations were sites of heinous crimes with deep ideological and institutional ties to the systematic murder of European Jews during the Holocaust.

In addition to documenting many little-known sites of persecution, frequently for the first time in English, this volume also initiates a new publishing and dissemination model for the Encyclopedia series. It is the first volume in which chapters will be published digitally and on a rolling basis until the complete manuscript is available via Project MUSE. Following the launch of a major chapter on transit camps for Poles that details many of the key themes of this volume, readers can expect subsequent chapters to publish in stages thereafter. Newly-published content will be immediately integrated into the now digitized, fully searchable series and its interactive map, continuously enriching the user experience and enabling readers to fully explore the vast, interconnected camp universe documented in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.