Forgotten Horrors
The Nazi sub-camp system
My name is Robin Whitlock. I am a freelance journalist based in Weston-super-Mare in South West England, UK. I am a bit of a World War 2 nutcase, having been interested in the subject since childhood and with a sizeable collection of books and movies covering the subject. Hardly a days go by without me reading about some aspect of the subject, either in book form or on the internet or via social media.
Copy of original photo of Dachau concentration camp inmate, by Dale Cruse, Flickr
Sub-camps administered by Dachau (not all of them are shown - see Dachau main page for enlarged version of this map)
Website background image: Surviving prisoners at Dachau cheer approaching US troops who are about to liberate them. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Wikimedia Commons).
Home page image: "Never Again" memorial inside Dachau concentration camp. (Elwood J Blues/Wikimedia Commons)
This image (left): Dead SS guards lie beside Dachau's Watchtower B following the camp's liberation by US troops in 1945. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/US National Archives.
Please note: This website is very much a 'work in progress' and so large sections of it remain uncompleted. Given that this is very much a spare time project, this will take time to complete. Apologies, but your understanding is appreciated.
A few years ago, I happened to stumble across, on Wikipedia, the list of subcamps administered by Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, Germany, 101 of them in total. I was shocked to say the least, as, although I had obviously heard of the major Nazi concentration camps - Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Sobibor, etc - I hadn't realise, until then, that several of them had subcamp systems. Nor did I realise just how many camps were in those subcamp systems. I realised that if I myself, someone with a reasonably good knowledge of WW2 and the Holocaust, or so I thought, hadn't heard about these subcamps until now, it surely must be the case that a great many other people hadn't heard of them either. In short, this seemed to be an aspect of the Holocaust that is in danger of being forgotten.
This is the reason why I've called this website 'Forgotten Horrors'. It is not to suggest that the Holocaust itself is in danger of being forgotten - although there is certainly a risk of that, I certainly don't believe that to be the case just yet - but because, like me initially, it is probably the case that, outside serious students of the Holocaust, survivors and their relatives and the local communities living around the sites themselves, most ordinary people probably only know the names of the larger camps and therefore have little idea or awareness of the hundreds of smaller camps and work details that actively contributed to the horrendous suffering of the victims.
If my experience is anything to go by, when this is taken into account, suddenly the holocaust becomes a lot more horrific than ever you may have thought before. This website therefore represents an attempt to investigate all the camps that aren't well known, the fractured ruins that stand forgotten in fields and woods, areas of now peaceful countryside that once bore witness to massed human tragedy and pain.
If you want to know how dark and terrible the holocaust really was, spend a little time here. But be warned, as you may expect, it makes for grim reading....
Get Involved
If you have any information about concentration camps that you think would be valuable or should be included on this website, please get in touch by emailing me at:
Thank you.