Shocking Discovery of the Holocaust Camps

On March 1, 2013, in an article called “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking” from the New York Times, Eric Lichtblau reported about an appalling discovery involving the Jewish holocaust, during which most Jews were sent to concentration camps. For the past thirteen years, researchers began the task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, and killing factories that the Nazis set up all throughout Europe. The shocking discovery was that these researchers have cataloged about 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps in Europe, which shows that the numbers are far higher than what the world has originally thought until today. These documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies. There were “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies would be killed after birth. The map that researchers made with this data turned all of Europe into black clusters of death, torture, and slavery. The reported number of Jews dead was set to about six million. However, lead editors on this project estimate that fifteen to twenty million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of the campsites. Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, stated, “We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the numbers are unbelievable” (New York Times).