Washington - The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Wednesday released the first volume of an encyclopaedia of Nazi camps and ghettos, part of a project that will identify 20,000 such sites. The encyclopedia, part of a seven-volume project, is to provide "the first comprehensive survey of all known Nazi camps and ghettos" between 1933 and 1945, the museum said in a press statement.
Geoffrey Megargee, project director for the encyclopaedia, said the research showed that the "Nazi concentration camp universe was much larger than scholars had previously believed."
The encyclopedia brings together in English information that has been scattered through millions of pages of unpublished and archive material in many different languages.
Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, called the encyclopaedia an "indispensable resource for Holocaust scholarship."
"The Museum is committed to ensuring that the full extent of the Holocaust is known, especially as the denial of the Holocaust as a historical reality increases," he said.
The remaining six volumes are to be published by 2018.
