Mapping the Holocaust

The chapter introduces Agnew’s three-fold definition of place – as location, locale, and sense of place – to structure its reflections. Over the last thirty years, a digital revolution has transformed what it is possible to map since Martin Gilbert first produced his Atlas of the Holocaust. The rich array of printed and digital maps now available serve both historiographical and memorial purposes. In terms of location, the terrain depicted has shifted eastwards in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and often homed in on meso- and micro-regions, representing spaces long neglected in older surveys. Moving on to locale, the chapter introduces recent work on the Nazi understanding of “Raum” and on the place of the Holocaust in the colonial imagination. Other studies have explored the spatial patterns of arrests and deportations, the multiple border changes of ghettos, or the creation and destruction of new kinds of spaces for concentrating and murdering human beings. Finally, historians of victim experience have used a variety of means to convey victims’ sense of place and space both at the time and as conveyed through testimony.