The Holocaust was a profoundly geographical event that caused mass displacement and migration, destroyed or fundamentally changed thousands of communities, and created hundreds of new places for the concentration of population, the exploitation of labor, and the mass murder of millions of people. Yet its spatial characteristics and temporal dynamics have scarcely been studied as explicitly geographical phenomena. Nor have scholars critically considered the complex and varied range of spatial scales at which the events constituting the Holocaust took place, from the individual body to the continental expanse of Europe. Through a partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and access to its exceptionally detailed datasets, the research team will build a set of GIS applications and geovisualizations to carry out four overlapping and interlinked case studies on (1) the evolution of the spatial system of concentration camps; (2) a comparative study of victim transports from France and Italy; (3) a localized study of forced evacuations or death marches from concentration camps at the end of WWII; and (4) a detailed study of the Budapest ghetto. These cases have been chosen for their suitability for GIScience modeling and analysis at a variety of scales and because they represent the range of spatial experiences of Holocaust victims (ghettoization, transportation, incarceration in the concentration camp system).
This project will be the first systematic examination of the geographies of the Holocaust. Previous historical scholarship on the Holocaust has focused on Nazi policy, individual camps, particular atrocities, or the history of certain communities, groups, or nations. This project will take a synoptic view of the Holocaust as a multi-layered, multi-scaled event and analyze it by employing geographic information science (GIScience methodologies. For GIScience, the challenges posed by historical source data make this project a significant opportunity to advance new approaches to metadata and source interpretation. Our research methods will provide models for other scholars working in historical GIS as well. Few studies have moved historical GIS (HGIS) beyond the important but conceptually limited stage of infrastructure development to grapple with substantive research questions. Even fewer HGIS projects have examined historical events or conditions of major social significance. This project does both.
The results of this project will be disseminated through professional conference presentations, a final workshop at the USHMM open to the general public, peer-reviewed journal articles, a book co-edited by the two PIs with contributions from all the project's participants, and an interactive website on the Geographies of the Holocaust to be built and hosted at the USHMM. Finally, data and GIS applications will be deposited at the USHMM Archives and the Registry of Survivors for long-term preservation and dissemination.
