Scholar at Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Speaks

Geoffrey Megargee, senior applied research scholar in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., presented a lecture entitled, “Cataloging a World Behind Wire: The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos,” Tuesday evening, Nov. 18 at the University of Redlands. Over the last 15 years, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been compiling an encyclopedia that, when complete, will be the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the camps, ghettos and other sites of detention, persecution and murder under Nazi Germany and its European allies. The process of creating the encyclopedia has revealed new information, not just about the individual camps, but about their variety, prisoners’ experiences, and the camps’ visibility within German society. Megargee, the project director and general editor of the encyclopedia, provided an overview of the camp universe and discussed the ways in which the project has changed our understanding of history. The lecture was co-sponsored by the University of Redlands’ departments of English, Modern Literatures and Languages, and History, the Dean’s Office, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, the Spatial Studies Institute and the Office of the Chaplain. As a related event, the University of Redlands will welcome Wendy Lower, John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna University, for Women’s History Month on March 11, 2015. Lower is the author of “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” a 2013 National Book Award finalist.