Traditional paper maps may have a certain nostalgic charm, but digital maps are being used more and more frequently for understand historical events, their contexts, and their spatial dimensions. They can be dynamic and interactive, and they can incorporate and link vast amounts of information.
Users can zoom seamlessly from a Europe-wide view down to a single street in Berlin or a small village in Poland, toggling different layers of information on and off with a click: deportation routes, locations of concentration and extermination camps, sites of resistance or Jewish life before 1933. This alone is a huge advantage over analog maps, which offer only a single, unchangeable view.
But it goes much deeper – in the truest sense of the word. The term deep mapping often comes up when we talk about digital maps in the context of historical education, and that is much more than just placing a point on a map: deep mapping means drilling down into the underlying historical layers of a place. It links geographic coordinates with the biographies of victims and perpetrators, historical photos, documents, and eyewitness accounts – even 3-D reconstructions of destroyed synagogues and other buildings.
In this way, history instantly becomes something that can be experienced spatially through multimedia. Instead of abstract data and names, we can see where events took place, the routes people had to take, how different locations were connected, and how landscapes and human lives changed over time in those places. That is hardly possible with a conventional map. It might show us the where, but rarely the how, who, or why in such a networked and layered way. This is the core idea behind deep mapping. But what does it look like in practice? Where do these detailed pieces of information come from? And how are they integrated into the map?
We had no idea how overwhelming the map of Nazi crimes would be, covered in markers that represent the sites where atrocities were committed.
We talked about this with Leonid Klimov, science editor at dekoder. This online magazine builds a bridge between Eastern European journalism and the German public, and it created the Education Agenda NS-Injustice project “Der Krieg und seine Opfer” [The War and its Victims], a ten-part “scrollytelling” documentary about the German-Soviet war between 1941–1945. At the same time, the Map of National Socialist Crimes was developed – an interactive digital atlas that visualizes the locations of Nazi crimes and makes the scale of those crimes visible.
What motivated you to create an interactive map as a companion to “Der Krieg und seine Opfer” [The War and its Victims]?
When we began working on our scroll documentary, our team firmly believed that the subject of National Socialism had already been thoroughly researched and digitized in Germany and that all the relevant data was easily accessible. But that turned out not to be the case. Despite the wealth of research and the abundance of data, it has by no means been systematically compiled – and often it is not available in a usable digital format.
In this context, “digital” doesn’t just mean scanning books. If you want to illustrate the progression of a war on a map, it’s not enough to use just any old map. You need shapefiles, specific georeferenced points, lines or areas in a special format that can be used in a digital map. We quickly realized that this type of data was scarce, so for the first episode of our project, we painstakingly assigned geo-coordinates to each location. To do this, we drew on the Holocaust Encyclopedia published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the extensive data collection provided by Yad Vashem. Here again, we had to invest a great deal of work to convert the data into a usable format. For some topics that we spent a long time researching – such as concentration camps – we can now say that our map is nearly complete in terms of data. Whenever we came across gaps during the process, we reached out directly to individual memorial sites to request additional information on satellite camps. And even this data was often made available to us in forms we first had to adapt to make it usable for the map. All in all, the process involved a lot of manual labor and painstaking processes. Once we had done all that, we thought it would be a shame to only show this data within the scroll documentaries. We felt it needed to be included on a separate overview map. And it was well worth it: we had no idea how overwhelming the map of Nazi crimes would be, covered in markers that represent the sites where atrocities were committed.
When you open the map, it says “Work in progress.” Are you still working on it? Are you planning, for instance, a participatory campaign in the spirit of citizen science?
We will continue to develop the map as part of our next project – we’ll be adding and correcting data and working more closely with memorial sites going forward. The map was built with a technical setup that allows for collaborative work – data can be entered via a spreadsheet that is accessible online. This makes it possible to include information that is otherwise difficult to access, collected by individuals and organizations at multiple locations.
How can the map be used systematically, and what potential do digital maps hold for historical-political education?
Our map visualizes the scale and diversity of Nazi crimes at different locations – all in a single resource. It can serve as a database and starting point for educational projects or as a foundation for digital travel guides or apps that enable users to explore real-world places and access historical information about them. The Berlin History App is a great example. You can walk through a neighborhood with a digital guide, see the places, and visit them intentionally – even when nothing is physically visible there anymore.
In our scroll documentary, the goal is to reveal broader connections – the kind that even individual protagonists themselves might not have been aware of. We place their personal stories within a broader historical context. Comprehensive datasets and detailed maps are essential here. These tools allow us to integrate information into our work quickly and efficiently. The journalistic perspective is very important to us, too. Journalists today rely heavily on data-driven research for longer formats, but so far there has been very little data research focused on the Nazi era – largely because the datasets are highly fragmented and inconsistent. If, for instance, there were a dataset that included all satellite camps in Germany – with information on which companies used forced labor there – it would be an ideal foundation for a data-driven publication where that information could be analyzed and visualized. This kind of map- and data-based work lays the foundation for many other steps in digital communication – whether in journalism, education, or research.
Author: Leonore Martin, Specialist Advisor at EVZ Foundation
Explore the scrollytelling documentary and the map of National Socialist crimes.
