Atlas of the Holocaust

The Atlas of the Holocaust, the product of seven years' intensive research, is a unique record of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe during the Second World War.

Martin Gilbert has drawn each of the 316 maps especially for this Atlas; all are fully annotated and are based on documentary evidence from an extremely wide range of sources.

The Atlas traces each phase of the Holocaust, starting with the anti-Semitic violence of pre-war Germany, and leading to the German conquest of countries in which the Jews had lived for centuries. Set out here in compelling detail is the spread of the early random killings, the systematic mass expulsion from thousands of towns and villages, the establishment of ghettos, the deliberate starvation of Jews trapped in these ghettos, the setting up of the death camps, the distant deportations to those camps, the slave-labour camp system, the death marches and the executions from the time of Germany's military domination to the very last days of the Allied liberation.

Presented in chronological order, the maps bear witness to the tragedy of the Holocaust as it unfolded month by month and week by week, in each of the Jewish communities of Europe. Also shown on the maps are more than two hundred acts of resistance and revolt, as well as areas of Jewish partisan activity; avenues of escape and rescue, and the fate of individuals.
The maps set the Holocaust in the context of war itself we see how the fate of the Jews was bound up with the German armies' advance, first in Poland, then in Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium and Holland, then in Yugoslavia and Greece, then the Soviet Union, and finally, as late as March 1944, in Hungary; providing with each advance the impetus and means for mass murder. The maps trace the deportation of Jews from the Nazi-dominated States to the death camps, as well as the refusal of several States to agree to deportation. The maps then show the slow but inexorable advance of the Allies, plotted month by month, toward Berlin, with the evacuations and death marches, as well as the liquidation of the remaining ghettos and slave labour camps.