Far more Nazi camps than widely believed

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- The number of World War II Nazi concentration camps in Europe topped 20,000, not the 5,000 to 7,000 most scholars knew of, a new encyclopedia says.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933-1945 -- whose first volume, published by Indiana University Press, is set for release June 12 -- says that for every commonly known camp, such as Auschwitz, there were dozens more that most people, including scholars, probably never heard of.

"What's going to happen is that the mental universe of how scholars operate is going to change," Steven Katz, director of Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, told the Washington Post.

"Instead of thinking of main death camps, people are going to understand that this was a continentwide phenomenon," Katz said.

"Think about what this means," Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, which oversaw the research of some 230 contributors from around the world, told the Post.

"For anyone who thinks this took place out of sight of the average person, this shatters that mythology," he said. "There was one Auschwitz. There was one Treblinka. But there were 20,000 other camps spread through the rest of Europe."

Encyclopedia Editor Geoff Megargee told the Post about a professional signer in a sub-camp of Germany's Flossenburg concentration camp who sang "Ave Maria" for her fellow prisoners one Christmas.

"She moved the barracks to tears," he said. "Then a guard overheard her and came and knocked her teeth out."