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