The Project

Our approach

Racism, antisemitism and attacks on liberal democracy are present in every part of Germany even eighty years after the end of the Nazi regime. All the more important is information about the historical context, causes and consequences. Memorial culture is changing and must reach new generations — with new forms of mediation.

The association dieKunstBauStelle e. V. in Landsberg am Lech has worked with various projects to commemorate recent German history, particularly the crimes in Landsberg itself: Adolf Hitler was imprisoned here in 1924 after his failed putsch of 1923 and wrote parts of his manifesto „Mein Kampf". One of the largest concentration-camp sub-camp complexes in Bavaria was nearby. After 1945, displaced persons lived in camps in Landsberg. The association is committed to participatory and digital projects of memorial culture.

More about the host organisation →

How the app works

• Every location of a Nazi crime is assigned a pin on the map.
• A click on the pin reveals historical facts in text and image alongside source information.
• The data cover all Nazi crimes prosecuted after the war up to 1945, together with sources and data collections on the Holocaust that document the crime scenes. Used archives include Yad Vashem, the Arolsen Archives and the Central Office in Ludwigsburg.
• The sources do not capture every detail of each crime but offer a starting point for local research and an overview of the scale of the atrocities.
• These crimes were committed not only by official Nazi commandos but also by individuals acting on their own responsibility: denunciation, destruction or appropriation of property, physical violence and many more.
• Some crimes are widely known, such as the destruction of Jewish institutions in the Night of Broken Glass on 9 November 1938. Others have been forgotten or were silenced later. The app visualises the scale of crimes through the map and the different categories.

What is not captured

From the first to the last day of the Nazi dictatorship, perpetrators — and, less often, female perpetrators — committed crimes first in Germany and later across Europe. Victims included Jews, Sinti and Roma, political opponents, those with mental or physical illness, resistance fighters, forced labourers, concentration-camp inmates and many more. It was not only high officials who contributed to the criminal regime but people from every social stratum. The crimes were not committed only at execution pits and in extermination camps in occupied eastern Europe, but everywhere in Germany.

After 1945 the Allied victors and the German judiciary initiated investigations and trials to punish the perpetrators. Despite decades of effort, not every crime was cleared up. Often all the victims had been murdered, so no one was left to testify. Evidence was thin, perpetrators denied involvement, had gone into hiding, or had already died.

During the Cold War, political conditions in eastern Europe hampered investigations by West German judicial bodies. Furthermore, the West German judiciary often granted many perpetrators the status of accessory rather than principal, leading to low sentences or acquittals. Some judicial authorities also destroyed files relating to Nazi crimes.

Against this background, the NaziCrimesAtlas cannot show every Nazi crime. Its mission is to record every documented Nazi crime that took place at locations within today's German borders.

Limited geolocation

Due to the vast number of crimes and the lack of precise location data in the sources, it is not always possible to assign an act to an exact address on the map. Especially in large cities such as Berlin or in towns with very many documented acts, pins cannot always be placed precisely. In the course of the project, and especially through the cooperation of local initiatives, these geographical inaccuracies will be progressively resolved.

After the deaths of most contemporary witnesses, we hope that the places where the crimes were committed will serve memory and commemoration. We are releasing the app to the public in the hope that it will be further enriched by civic engagement.