Concentration camps. Crematoria. Gas chambers. Nazi medicine. Each brings to mind terrifying images of the universe created by Nazi Germany during its 12 short and violent years. All told, 11 million human beings were murdered by people who believed they were superior — physically, genetically, culturally — to other human beings. The Nazis and their allies built more than 10,000 camps across Europe to imprison their enemies and to implement their ruthless policy of radical racial eugenics that targeted 6 million Jews for extermination. That systematic murder was the Holocaust. But the Nazis also savagely murdered Gypsies, communists, Soviet POWs, Poles, the mentally ill, persons with genetic birth defects, the elderly, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, intellectuals, outspoken clergy, and nearly anyone else who was labled an enemy of the Third Reich. Their deaths reached 5 million. During the summer of 2000 and the fall of 2001, I was able to document the world of terror created by the Nazis — in the camps they built, in the rooms where they plotted the extermination of millions of men, women, and children. Please click on each image to open separate photo galleries highlighting photographic essays from my travels.
You can also read my story on visiting more than 20 concentration and death camps in the summer of 2000. On Dec. 26, 2022, I published an essay on the overlooked humanitarian and Auschwitz-Birkenau escapee Rudolf Vrba. Vrba was among four Jewish prisoners at the death and concentration camp who escaped in April and May 1944. Their detailed reports on the Nazi’s death machine helped alert the world about the Nazi’s genocidal operations. His actions, with those of his fellow escapees, were instrumental in helping save more than 200,000 lives in Hungary from deportation and death.
Click on each photo to open a gallery with photo essays.
Keywords: Gusen, Terezin, Thereisenstadt, Fløslevlejren, Gillelej, Berlin, Olympic Stadium, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Mittelbau-Dora, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Death Camps, Arbeit Macht Frei, Concentration Camp, Death Camp, Work Camp, Labor Camp, Gas Chamber, Gaskammer, Konzentrationslager, Belzec, Gross-Rosen, Krakow, Majdanek, Plaszow, Sobibor, Treblinka, Warsaw, Warsaw Ghetto, Mauthausen, Vernichtungslager, Vught, Stuthoff