One of the most important tools that historians can utilize are primary sources of different kinds. When thinking of primary sources most historians consider written sources first, but the material sources can be just as important, often examining them leads to examining new patterns and answering historical questions that are being posed in groundbreaking research; looking back on interpretations of the past using new methodologies. Geographies of the Holocaust accomplishes just this using spatial history methods, new digital technologies, and the examination of the horrific events of the Holocaust through different breakdowns of space and place as it relates to a variety of different scales and contexts.

Historical GIS is the use of spatial technologies and geographical data plotting and analysis that utilizes historical documents and sources to spatially map areas and events. This, much like historical archaeology is an interdisciplinary field of study and a field that is important to understand in a variety of different disciplines like anthropology and history. GIS is useful for many different topics. In my own research, I am interested in mapping the labor conducted in late 19th-century kitchens to see how technological advances at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution impacted the workflow and amount of housework that women were expected to do within a single room of the home. I can do this by analyzing primary source documents including photos, advertisements, Sears catalogues, women’s periodicals, and household advice manuals alongside physical and material spaces in reconstructed museum exhibits.

In Geographies of the Holocaust, GIS comes into play a variety of different ways. From the micro to the macro, the book examines the events and trauma of the Holocaust from different scales, the individual body, to the ghettoization of entire cities, to the control that was exerted over entire countries by the Nazi regime’s propaganda (Knowles et al, 2-3). One of the most important aspects to the work and the writing of the book is the treatment of every chapter as a sort of “case study.” While the Introduction describes the importance of collaboration in the research and writing, GIS is a team effort (Knowles et al, 12-13). Analyzing historical documents, gathering data, interpreting data after examining it for newfound patterns, takes a team of people. Each chapter within the book was broken down and written by people specializing in a particular method, but the consistency in interpreting data and working to consistently recognize the human limitations of truly interpreting the Holocaust is critical to understanding the conclusions in the book.

While the book contains a variety of themes, the two most important terms that echo throughout every chapter are the importance of space and place. In Spatial History, place was defined as a space that had meaning attributed to it, because of human activity (Knowles, pg. 4). Space was more difficult to define with there being various meanings attached to the direct correlation or location to place.

Chapter 2 focuses directly on the one of the most prominent symbols of the Holocaust the SS concentration camps. Examining the spatial placement and the changes over time also shares information relating to the movements of German control throughout the war, and the changes that the camps had to go through individually to accommodate more prisoners, and spread German control over marginalized groups victimized under German, and Heinrich Himmler’s control. (Knowles et al, pg. 26)

In Chapter 4 of the book, location and the correlation of distance and place was analyzed to try and understand the meaning between the perpetrators of killings in the East and the distance between killings, the distance of the perpetrator from the location of the killings, to attempt and understand how this had an impact on the mental psyche of perpetrators. I found this chapter immensely interesting because of my own interest in GIS research and the idea of grasping mental landscapes and meanings from interacting directly with physical location and space. Examining the path of rounding up victims for the killing fields and then transporting them to the location where they would ultimately die is an interesting topic to focus on. While in previous chapters the complete loss of control seemed to be a focus for researchers, the agency that victims had and the close contact that soldiers had when rounding people up makes the examination into the transformation of the German soldiers’ psyche draw the interesting conclusion that by examining this topic spatially it almost adds a more human dimension into the story. While historians can assert that through analyzing empirical data spatially they are “quantifying human life” and removing the emotional element that is so important to historical research, in this chapter they are doing the exact opposite. Bringing readers and viewers of the visualizations along a route that historians have not examined previously, leading to a more nuanced argument about the morality of genocide and questioning the humanity within (Knowles et al, pg. 115).

Bibliography

Knowles, Anne Kelly, et al. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. muse.jhu.edu/book/30838.