Scholar: Holocaust crimes in countryside, small towns, too

by Kayleigh Kulp

Staff Writer

Issue date: 10.06.2004

www.washingtonsquarenews.com/news/campus/7869.html

Contrary to collective contemporary memory, the genocide of the Holocaust was perpetrated as much in small towns and the countryside as in the sprawling, mechanized death camps of the Third Reich, a Holocaust scholar said last night at the Kimmel Center.

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Twenty-five percent, or about 1.4 million of total number of Jews killed were murdered outside of “bureaucratic processes,” Engel said, while 57 percent of total murdered Jews perished in concentration camps. The rest died in local, small-scale murders in smaller countries like Croatia, Ukraine and Estonia, said Engel, a Hebrew and Judaic studies professor and author of “The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews.”

It happened outside of people’s homes and police headquarters; even peasants joined the Nazis to destroy lives. This is a little-known fact today, even to Holocaust scholar Rolf Wolfswinkel, a historian and the organizer of the series.

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