Geographies of the Holocaust

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Geographies of the Holocaust

Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole

THE HOLOCAUST DESTROYED COMMUNITIES, DISPLACED millions of people from their homes, and created new kinds of places where prisoners were concentrated, exploited as labor, and put to death in service of the Third Reich’s goal to create a racially pure German empire. We see the Holocaust as a profoundly geographical phenomenon, though few scholars have analyzed it from that perspective.¹ We hope this book will change that by demonstrating how much insight and understanding one can gain by asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate even the most familiar subjects in the history of the Holocaust.

At its most fundamental, a geographical approach to the Holocaust starts with questions of where. Print atlases of the Holocaust, for example, have focused on the location of major concentration camps and Jewish ghettos, the routes of train lines used to transport prisoners to the camps, and the journeys of individual survivors, such as Primo Levi’s path as he sought his way home after being liberated from Auschwitz.² Other examples include maps of where people were arrested, where they were sent, where they were murdered. The facts of location are basic to understanding any historical event. In the case of the Holocaust, such facts are exceedingly voluminous, because the Nazis kept detailed records of their operations and because many people who were caught up in the events as victims or bystanders recorded where their experiences took place.

Although location is the crucial substrate of the many geographies of the Holocaust, it is just one of the many spatial facets of Holocaust history. Our geographical studies have mainly focused on the spaces and places that people created, occupied, passed through, and endured–the material landscapes that were essential to the implementation of the Holocaust and inseparable from people’s experience of it. While other scholars are currently theorizing the spaces and places of victimization in the Holocaust–work that we see as strongly complementary to our project³–we have sought to understand them by making them more visible. This is why choosing the scales of analysis was the first step in our project.

Scale,⁴ one of the overarching geographical concepts that bind together our diverse case studies, is a key concept in human and physical geography,⁵ where it is investigated with qualitative and quantitative methods. In our work, scale is operationalized primarily as a conceptual device, a way of framing particular aspects of the physical and social world in order to render its structure and meaning intelligible. In anchoring our perspective in this understanding of scale, we are aware that the term has a multitude of meanings for scholars today, particularly in geography, and that it has become much more than a quantitative construct, such as the scale of a map. Some regard scale as the material product of political, social, and economic processes: others debate its ontological status–does scale really exist?–or its metaphorical meanings.⁶ For us, scale has great value as an analytical framework, as we hope the case studies in this book will demonstrate.

At what scale could one perceive, describe, and analyze the expansion of the SS concentration camp system? Ghettoization in Budapest? The mass murder of civilians in the East? The arrest and deportation of Jews in Italy? The construction of and evacuations from Auschwitz? Investigating the where of these Holocaust events necessarily means working at a variety of scales, for they took place from the macro scale of the European continent; through the national, regional, and local scales of individual countries, areas, and cities; and down to the micro scale of the individual body. By examining the Holocaust at different scales, the essays in this book begin to unearth the Nazis’ conception and execution of a comprehensive geography of oppression. This geography of oppression includes not only broadly territorial ideas such as Lebensraum, which distinguished Aryan versus non-Aryan space, but also the specific work of planning and designing Germanified cities, Jewish ghettos, and concentration camps. All of these concepts and actions involved physical destruction and construction of the built environment.

The Nazi vision for the Reich, the policies intended to realize it, and the resulting actions on the ground were all manifestations of the powerfully geographical notion of territoriality. Applying geographer Robert David Sack’s insight that territoriality is the primary geographic expression of social power,⁷ one can see the effort to establish territorial dominance as an impulse present at every level of the Nazis’ restructuring of European society. At the regional and continental scales, military conquest and the forging of political alliances redrew political boundaries, engulfed large territories in a greater Germany, and briefly claimed much of continental Europe as subject to or allied with the Third Reich. Territorial conquest and political alliances opened the way to expand the concentration camp system and allowed German planners to re-envision the East as part of a New Order where undesirable peoples would be replaced by German communities. At the scale of the city, territorial definitions and restrictions on spatial access divided Jewish from non-Jewish space in myriad ways. In ghetto cities such as Budapest, Jews were first forbidden to frequent certain cafés, cinemas, and other public places, and later they were required to live in certain buildings and allowed on city streets only during prescribed hours. Finally, Jews were forced to live in extremely confined neighborhoods–strictly bounded ghettos–where they were vulnerable to disease, deprivation, and in some cases deportation and execution. In the camps, prisoners lost control over virtually every aspect of their lives, risking death if they stepped out of line or failed to stand for the duration of a roll call. From the scale of the body to the scale of the continent, the Nazis violently imposed new rules that restructured daily life for victims, perpetrators, and bystanders by declaring–and enforcing–where people could and could not go, where and how they could and could not live, all depending on the social category to which they were assigned. The result was a geography of oppression that was ideologically, racially, and economically motivated; explicitly enunciated; and materially implemented at all scales of human experience.

This leads to another dimension of geography that we examine in this book: the meanings people assigned to space and place in the Holocaust. The twin concepts of space and place are difficult to pin down with any kind of precision or certainty. Yet place and space are fundamental to human emotion and experience. While these concepts are deeply connected to the physical environment, much of their richness comes from the mediation of human perception and our notions of value. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has defined place as a center of felt value.⁸ This seemingly simple definition can be applied across all scales and kinds of human experience, from the intimacy of familial love to fealty to one’s homeland. The more abstract concept of space, Tuan suggests, refers to containers of human activity–such as the space of a room or the spatial extent of a region–as well as emotional experiences ranging from the exhilarating freedom of open spaces to the dread of the unknown.

Social theorists have given much attention to the epistemological and ontological complexity of space and place,⁹ and cultural geographers have particularly probed the politics of controlling space and defining place, whether through law, custom, or ideology.¹⁰ The felt value of places in the Holocaust ran the gamut of emotional extremes, from the celebratory associations of Teutonic architecture and urban planning for those who designed Auschwitz to the terror prisoners felt upon seeing a concentration camp. The Holocaust transformed the meaning as well as the materiality of every place and space it touched. It created new spaces of confinement, such as box cars, and gave frightening new meanings to mobility.¹¹ The literal position that a Wehrmacht soldier occupied at a killing site became a reflection of his moral culpability as well as his sense of duty or bravery. The various tasks involved in killing a group of Jews in a Belarus village became spatially coded, with different meanings assigned to the cordon, the march, the shooting zone, the mass grave. Similarly, for prisoners sent on forced evacuations from Auschwitz, survival could come down to one’s place in the microgeography of the column. Marching with a friend could keep one going, while becoming an isolated straggler could be fatal. Reduced to the physicality of their bodies, marchers formed mobile communities that retained many aspects of the camp despite their radical displacement outside the walls and barbed wire. Thus, the places and spaces of the Holocaust were both intensely personal and governed by multiscaled systems of ideas and the machinery that put those ideas into action. One of the most unusual aspects of our approach to the Holocaust is our conviction that spatial analysis and geovisualization can complement and help specify the humanistic understanding of space and place by exploring and quantifying relationships among things and people to discover and visualize spatial patterns of activity. This complementarity is at the core of our research method.

The research that gave rise to these ideas is situated in the confluence of several broad streams of scholarship that we collectively brought to this project, most notably Holocaust Studies, historical geography, and Geographic Information Science (commonly abbreviated as GIScience). Although Holocaust Studies is by its nature a multidisciplinary field, few if any research projects have sought explicitly to merge disciplinary approaches, as our group of geographers and historians has tried to do during our collaboration. Scholarship in Holocaust Studies has considered some profoundly spatial issues, such as confinement and transport, but scholars have generally used conventional methods from narrative history and literary or cultural studies to address them. Since historical geographer Andrew Charlesworth’s pioneering studies of Holocaust landscapes, few explicitly geographical works have applied geographic concepts to empirical case studies or focused on developing theoretical approaches to Nazi oppression.¹² Our approach, while often both intensely empirical and informed by theory, emphasizes the testing of methods of spatial analysis and visual representation. We use these methods to interrogate historical sources that in many cases have never been scrutinized for their geographical content. The results show promise for generating new questions and new knowledge. We also employ geographical methods to nuance and challenge the established historiography of the Holocaust. Much of the existing Holocaust scholarship has been based on archival research that analyzes the paper trail left by the perpetrators to explore questions of motivation and causation at a variety of scales. More recently, allied to broader shifts in the discipline of history, attention has been paid to victim experiences, in particular to gendered experiences of the Holocaust.¹³ Chapters in this book offer insights into these subjects, as well as contributing to the least studied category of actors: those problematically dubbed bystanders.¹⁴

Our focus on space and place does not, however, eschew chronology.¹⁵ Narratives of events and change over time are central to several of our studies. What we emphasize, however, are the ways that Holocaust spaces and places changed over time, seeing those shifts in geography as potential avenues for exploring shifting motivation.¹⁶ At times this is about changing patterns on the ground, but it is also about shifts (and mismatches) between what was planned and what was implemented, what was said and what was done, between policy and practice. Rather than rehashing canonical debates on decision making and structural conditions, we see new chronologies emerging from close geographical study of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz chapter suggests, for example, that paying attention to time as well as to space and place teases out a third spatio-temporal phase of construction that occurred between the better-known phases of planning and implementing mass murder. Mapping killings by the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania over time suggests that their actions may have been more varied, and perhaps more random or chaotic, than scholars have realized. A strong sense of chronology pervades all of our projects, and in many cases is a key structuring device. Within the shifting landscapes of the Holocaust, we seek to uncover the often fast-changing experiences of the victims. In Italy, the centers first targeted for deportation were places of opportunity–such as Borgo San Dalmazzo, where foreign-born Jews from France were arrested trying to escape the Vichy regime–or medium- and large-size cities of traditional Jewish presence. In Budapest, invisible walls of distance within the dispersed ghetto restricted access for many people but were breached by some.

Our second realm of influence is historical geography and the kindred fields of cultural geography, spatial history, historical GIS (HGIS), and what is coming to be called the spatial humanities. These have given us models of interdisciplinary research that frame historical questions in spatial terms.¹⁷ The reconstruction of past places and the study of how places have changed over time are central preoccupations in these fields, as they are in our studies of the SS concentration camp system, Auschwitz, and the Jewish ghettos in Budapest. Two other common themes in historical geography are the nature of historical communities and the ways in which experience becomes embedded in place.¹⁸ These, too, figure prominently in our work, most explicitly in our studies of the Holocaust in Italy, Wehrmacht atrocities in the East, and evacuations from Auschwitz. Our attention to how the physical environment can influence experience and events stems from the prominence of environmental research in HGIS¹⁹ and historical geographers’ reliance on historical maps as sources for researching landscape change.²⁰ From cultural geography, we derive our understanding of space as a complex social construction whose meanings include the multiple scales and settings of human interaction, the built landscape, and personal and social imaginaries.²¹ Methodologically, we draw upon historical geographers’ tradition of combining archival research with fieldwork and quantitative analysis to develop portraits of regions, cities, or smaller localities as distinctive places or representatives of types within larger systems.²² Work in HGIS has incorporated geospatial methods into that empirical tradition, with an emphasis on building spatio-temporal databases to visualize the patterns embedded in historical information and to analyze change over time.²³ The databases that undergird our case studies of SS camps, the Holocaust in Italy, the Budapest ghettos, and Auschwitz were designed with HGIS exemplars in mind. Scholarship in the spatial humanities generally takes a more open-ended, exploratory, suggestive approach. Scholars in this rapidly developing field seek to preserve and represent ambiguity, complexity, and the potential for multiple voices and interpretations, a view of history that has particularly influenced our interpretations of camp evacuations and Wehrmacht soldiers’ positionality.²⁴

The third major influence on our work, GIScience, was the initial impetus for this project. In recent years, massive, detailed compilations of information about victims of the Holocaust have come to light, some containing data on many thousands, even millions, of individuals.²⁵ Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) saw potential in GIS for managing and analyzing these enormous data sets. They sought our advice in 2005–2006, and our discussions eventually led to these prototype studies in applying geographical methods to the study of the Holocaust.²⁶ We have particularly focused on employing methods of spatial analysis and geovisualization, a term that includes cartography as well as other methods of visualizing and exploring geographic information. In this project, geovisualization and dynamic cartography have been crucial to exploring the making and unmaking of place and space as dynamic processes and states of becoming, while spatial analysis has allowed us to unearth spatial patterns and relationships inherent in the data. Whatever the methods used, a key step in the analytical process is determining the resolution of the data used. Resolution is defined as the smallest identifiable unit of analysis, whether in time or space: the smaller the unit of analysis, the higher the resolution. For example, monthly time series have lower temporal resolution than daily ones, and addresses of Jewish-designated residences in Budapest are at a higher spatial resolution than the cities where Jewish victims in Italy were arrested. This concept has epistemological implications, for what we can discover about the geography of a given phenomenon or event, and how we can investigate and represent it, is constrained by the resolution of the data. Furthermore, resolution affects which spatial analytical techniques and methods of geovisualization are appropriate, given the research objectives and the data available to the investigator. The range of spatial analytical techniques available is in fact very broad, and it is important to choose among these techniques with a clear understanding of their assumptions and limitations. From this perspective, the objective of our work is methodological as well as pedagogical: we aim to explain and to demystify techniques that are unfamiliar to most researchers outside of GIScience.²⁷

These three broad realms of scholarship have shaped each of our studies in particular ways, with varying disciplinary and methodological emphasis. In every case, however, we became acutely aware of the creative, if sometimes difficult, tension between the spatial models we created and the historical evidence from which they were built. Spatial analytical methods and geovisualization inevitably involve models that abstract reality. In a map, the spherical Earth becomes a two-dimensional Cartesian plane that at best simulates the look of three-dimensional reality. Every GIS database is based on mathematical and geometrical models of reality.²⁸ By using these methods, we do not claim to be describing the reality of experience; rather, we have done something different by modeling the physical conditions of the reality in which victims, perpetrators, and bystanders operated, in order to ask new questions and see historical circumstances in a new light. In the context of the Holocaust, models are particularly useful as complements to textual sources such as survivor memoirs and testimonies. Memoirs and testimonies contain detailed descriptions of places, people, and events, but the degree to which they can be generalized is problematic; on the other hand, well-defined models describe and discover characteristics of the spaces in which history took place that no single testimony can provide. Models can be used to frame testimonies, while testimonies bring to life what models can describe only in broad strokes. Models have also helped us empirically test a number of conceptual binaries that historians have often discussed only metaphorically, including space and place, distance and proximity, stasis and movement, visibility and invisibility, core and periphery. Across many of the chapters, models have also allowed us to explore issues of vulnerability, specifically how the location of victims and perpetrators made some people, potentially or in actuality, more vulnerable than others. We believe the combined use of models and more traditional careful reading of archival sources holds great potential to give us a richer understanding of the Holocaust.

Geography, as we practice it, is a visual way of knowing,²⁹ and indeed many of our discoveries and insights have come from the visualization of geographical and historical information. Visualizing has the potential to uncover things that may otherwise be invisible within textual sources. All the historians in our research group have had eureka moments when they saw information visualized for the first time. One of these for Tim Cole came when Alberto Giordano ran spatial analysis of the critical weeks in the middle of June 1944 when first one list of ghetto houses was issued and then, a week later, another list. What they discovered was that the shape of the ghetto actually changed little, contrary to Tim’s expectations. A similar revelation came when Paul Jaskot first saw an animation of construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1943 to April 1944 created by Chester Harvey from architecture plans, SS records, and aerial photographs. The animation worked a transformation in Paul’s architectural-historian’s imagination. Suddenly, he saw Auschwitz not as an accomplished fact, but as a site actively under construction–with all the attendant activity, coming and going, change to the built environment, and possible moments of chaos.

These examples illustrate how powerful maps can be as tools to acquire new levels of insight into how the Holocaust was put into place. However, we would not want anyone to read our maps as the totalizing gaze of the perpetrator. Rather than faithfully rendering this perspective, we see the act of mapping as, in part, a critical engagement with the worlds envisioned by the perpetrators. For example, by constructing a building-level model of Auschwitz based on Nazi architectural plans and other documents in the Zentralbauleitung archives, we have begun to disambiguate the Auschwitz that was actually constructed from the Auschwitz of the planners’ dreams. Clarifying differences between the ideal and the real has become a recurring theme in our research.

Moreover, because GIS provides a single platform for integrating and jointly analyzing most of our source material, we are able to ask questions from multiple perspectives or questions that interrogate multiple phenomena. The spaces we have begun to reconstruct were inhabited by all members of the wartime population. A camp like Auschwitz or ghettos like those in Budapest may have been built by perpetrators, but they were lived in by victims and witnessed by bystanders. These conventional divisions are problematic. Mapping prompts one to think about all the activities in which individuals engaged, and the associated physical and moral positions. At Auschwitz, for example, did camp guards briefly become bystanders when they left their posts to relax in one of the camp saunas, and did they remain bystanders, at least for a moment, when they stepped back into the space of the camp proper within view of a crematorium? In his study of Wehrmacht involvement in mass killings in Belarus, Waitman Beorn suggests that location need not be a mathematical or positivistic concept. It can in fact be deeply ambivalent, subjective, and suggestive.

This book and our entire project have their genesis in a radical moment of interdisciplinary collaboration. Brought together under the auspices of a USHMM Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Summer Research Workshop in August 2007, we quickly shifted from giving seminar papers to working collaboratively on a number of experimental projects during an intensive week when we began to learn the art of what we later joked was interspecies communication. Checking our egos at the door–as one of our colleagues later reflected–we began to work in small interdisciplinary teams that have persisted throughout the remaining years of the project and into this collection of essays. The six chapters that are the result of our collaboration range widely not only in scale, subject matter, and method, but also in their purpose and findings. Some of the chapters are speculative investigations into the possibilities of seeing the Holocaust from a geographical perspective. Others are highly empirical case studies that offer particular findings based on quantitative analysis. In both cases, the chapters do not delve deeply into the methodological issues raised by the research, although each chapter includes a section called Spotlight on Methods in which the authors describe their methods of inquiry. We do not mean to give readers the impression that the research behind these chapters was unproblematic or that we approached it uncritically. In fact, quite the opposite is true: this effort has been a challenge at times, but we found it essential for producing truly interdisciplinary work. All of our case studies are collaborations between at least one Holocaust historian and technically expert geographer. We chose to research, write, and edit collaboratively, though we knew it would be difficult, given the differences in our training and disciplinary habits, which are anchored in literatures and styles as diverse as feminist theory and GIScience. Our drafts went through several iterations as we tried to find each chapter’s unique balance between historiography and geographical analysis. At times it felt like a three-legged sack race. Deciding what matters most, and what constitutes adequate explanation, has not been easy, but we learn so much from each other that we continue to embrace the challenges of truly interdisciplinary practice.

For all their variety, however, the chapters share a common structure and general approach. In each chapter, the authors situate their key spatial questions in the context of relevant scholarship. The analysis is based upon both visual and textual evidence, for maps, archival photographs, digital models of the built environment, and spatial diagrams are essential for interrogating and representing the spaces and places of the Holocaust. Each chapter addresses some combination of the core geographic concepts we have identified here, and each chapter focuses on a particular scale. Chapter 2 looks at the Holocaust from the continental scale, asking how the early concentration camps and the SS camp system developed over space and time, with a special focus on the emergence of labor camps during the last two years of World War II. This study is based on a data set of SS camps developed by researchers in the Registry of Survivors (Holocaust Victims and Survivors Resource Center) at USHMM for use in making maps for volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.³⁰ The key methods here are thematic mapping of data explored through animated cartography and the visual overlay of related themes, specifically exploring the relationship between territorial boundary changes and the establishment of concentration camps. Chapter 3 moves to the regional scale of Italy in examining the spatio-temporal patterns of arrest, transportation, and ultimately deportation of Jews from Italy to Auschwitz, starting from a database of more than nine thousand individual arrests that was painstakingly compiled and