Holocaust Museum Memorial Maps

The most important geography during the Holocaust was how Germany was laid out and where the Nazis strategically placed their concentration camps to ensure the most harm to the minorities. Most ghettos and concentration camps were located in the east, where they "isolated and persecuted the Jewish population." The fact that many concentration camps were located in Poland, away from central Germany, is significant because it is a way for the Germans to torture the Jews in these camps without drawing much attention to themselves. Had the camps been in the middle of a big city, Germans who were against Nazism would see the horrors being done, and most likely protest or cause another sort of trouble. Germans knew Jews were being tortured, but by having the concentration camps so far away, it was a very vague and distant idea, and the German citizens would not have believed anything could be done. In addition, the Germans had also smartly placed a larger concentration camp in the middle of German. When the German territory started to shrink when the Soviet Union and the Allied powers started to win the war, "transports from evacuated camps arrived continuously at Dachau," the central camp. The fact that Nazis put so much thought in their placement of the camps showed just how intent they were on harming the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and other minorities.

I thought it was very clear that the maps were from a Holocaust memorial site. A lot of what the videos said were horrific statistics ("two in every three Jews were killed") that showed just how terrible the Holocaust was. Not to mention the pictures shown of Jews being forced to work, dead bodies laying in a pile, and masses and masses of starving people. I think the website already assumed people knew about the Holocaust and knew it was bad, but wanted to show pictures and statistics to emphasize just how bad it really was. I think this is really common in what memorials do. The main goal of a memorial is to make people feel emotion for what is being commemorated. Some monuments are for specific people, and show all the great things this person has done, and therefore what a loss it is that they are dead. In this case, the USHMM does not memorialize one person, but rather the millions and millions of people who died. They emphasize the number of people dead so that visitors really the losses caused by the Holocaust.