
Duke Researchers Help Map Holocaust Camps and Ghettos
Data visualization preserves and informs about Holocaust history
-By Charles Givens
January 28, 2025
A new online resource, Placing the Holocaust, provides detailed maps of over 2,200 camps and ghettos from the Holocaust. The project provides mappable data along with searchable transcripts of over 950 postwar interviews.
The project’s two main goals are to enable users to explore changes over location and time of the camps and ghettos and to expand geographic awareness of the Holocaust. The lead map designers of this visualization of camps and ghettos are Professor Anne Kelly Knowles from the University of Maine and her student Maja Kruse.
Duke University also played a significant role in the project’s development, with contributions from faculty, staff and students. Eve Duffy, Associate Vice Provost of Global Affairs, served as a consulting historian. Teams led by Paul Jaskot in the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab also made key contributions to the database construction.
The team behind Placing the Holocaust presented their findings on January 27, 2025, at the United Nations’ Holocaust Memorial Ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

“This map is a stunning visualization of sites of imprisonment and forced labor in the Nazi regime, both ghettos and camps,” said Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. “Rarely do we think of these two kinds of sites together and even less common is to think of them at the scale of occupied Europe as a whole. This map does both, and it forms the culmination of a major new historical database construction of camps and ghettos.”
The map, along with additional explanatory materials, is now a part of the United Nations’ permanent displays, which focus on making sure that visitors understand how the Holocaust occurred to avoid a repeat in the future. On January 27, 2025, the day celebrating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a panel of historians discussed the project and how to interpret the map and the work behind it.
The project is not meant to be comprehensive, as the work of documenting the tens of thousands of places associated with the Holocaust is ongoing.
Below are the participants in the project:
Placing the Holocaust core team members:
Eve Duffy, consulting historian
Associate Vice Provost of Global Affairs, Duke University
Gregory Gaines, graduate RA
History PhD student, University of Maine
Justus Hillebrand, consulting historian and database designer
Founder of Digital History Consulting, Inc., Waterville, Maine
Paul B. Jaskot, consulting historian
Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University
Anne Kelly Knowles, PI
Colonel James C. McBride, Distinguished Professor of History and founder of the Digital & Spatial History Lab, University of Maine
Maja Kruse, senior graduate RA
Interdisciplinary PhD student, University of Maine
Christine Liu, senior graduate RA
History PhD student, University of Maine
William JB Mattingly, senior data developer
Cultural Heritage Data Scientist, Yale University
Dan Miller, website designer
Katie Ritchie, undergraduate RA
History major and Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center Research Fellow, University of Maine
Additional team members:
Jakob Archer, undergraduate RA, History major, University of Maine
Emme Aylesworth, undergraduate RA, History major, University of Maine
Jules Connolly, undergraduate RA, French major, University of Maine
Nick Dieffenbacher-Krall, undergraduate RA, Computer Science major, University of Maine
Peter Murdock, undergraduate RA, History exchange student, Lancaster University
Ben Potter, undergraduate RA, Political Science major, University of Maine
Ian Reid, undergraduate RA, History major, University of Maine
Contributors to the Holocaust Ghettos Project (2018-2021) and conceptualization of place-based testimony search
Jeremy Braun, undergraduate RA, University of Maine
Al Cedor, undergraduate and graduate RA, University of Maine
Dakota Gramour, undergraduate and graduate RA, University of Maine
Will Kochtitzky, graduate consulting RA, University of Maine
Antonio LoPiano, graduate RA, Duke University
Nicci Mowszowski, undergraduate RA, Washington University in St. Louis
Caitlyn Rooms, undergraduate RA, University of Maine
Juana Torralbo-Higuera, graduate RA, Washington University in St. Louis
Anika Walke, consulting historian, Washington University in St. Louis
Levi Westerveld, GRID Arendal, Norway
