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. 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. 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 project–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, one of the overarching geographical concepts that bind together our diverse case studies, is a key concept in human and physical geography, 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. 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, 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...