Where Was the Holocaust?

Anne Knowles, University of Maine

A few iconic places, such as Auschwitz, the Warsaw ghetto, and Treblinka, have come to represent the Holocaust in the public imagination. Some spatial thinkers, including geographers, have further amplified the importance of those places by calling them “spaces of exception” where civil society gave way to ruthless brutality and rationality was turned upside down by arbitrary, extreme violence. I will argue that the familiarity and seeming exceptionality of the most studied, best-known Holocaust places obscure a greater truth: that the Holocaust was in fact ubiquitous, and that its spatial brand of violence was present from the beginning of the Nazi regime. This paper will answer the question “Where was the Holocaust” from the viewpoint of five geographical declarations that express the expanding and increasingly deadly logic of the Nazis’ spatial ideology. There! summarizes the Nazis’ focus on territory, and territorial expansion, as essential to preserve the Aryan people. This opening section will also show the impending collision of Nazi ambitions with the region of most concentrated Jewish population that stood in their way. Elsewhere! looks at Nazi efforts to control Jewish bodies and steps to remove Jews from Reich space. Everywhere! shows the ubiquity of the Holocaust in maps of thousands of camps and ghettos across Europe and North Africa, as well as a case study of how ghettoization involved large numbers of Jewish communities that never had a ghetto imposed. Nowhere! maps the geographies of genocide, the final step in mass removal of Jews. Anywhere! argues that the agency exercised by people targeted by the Nazis and their allies involved countless places of escape, hiding, and resistance that were even more ubiquitous than the Holocaust. Here! considers the lasting scars of the Holocaust in landscapes of remembrance and forgetting.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 33. Advances in Conceptual & Methodological Frameworks for Spatial History