Archive Details Scope of Nazi Camps

Absolutely chilling. Yet there are those out there who still want to deny what happened.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Within weeks of Hitler's 1933 rise to power, the iron gates slammed shut on inmates of the first Nazi concentration camps. It was the start of an unparalleled experiment in persecution and genocide that expanded over the next 12 years into a pyramid of ghettos, Gestapo prisons, slave labor camps and, ultimately, extermination factories.

Holocaust historians are only now piecing together the scattered research in many languages to understand the vast scope of the camps, prisons and punishment centers that scarred German-ruled Europe, like a pox on the landscape stretching from Greece to Norway and eastward into Russia.

Collecting and analyzing fragmented reports, researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum say they have pinpointed some 20,000 places of detention and persecution — three times more than they estimated just six years ago.

And soon they will know much more.

Yes, and some will still deny it. Others want to recreate it. Will we have the guts to stop them?