It resulted in six million Jews being murdered, as well as other people considered inferior by Nazis.
The Holocaust was over by 1945. However, there are still physical reminders of it in Europe.
Marc Wilson is now an accomplished photographer who has traveled to 130 different locations across 20 countries for six years.
For his book “A Wounded Landscape” he has collected 360 photographs that document the various 40,000 Nazi-occupied sites between 1939-1945.
Wilson examined areas where Jews were murdered along with gay people, learning disabled individuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and communists. He also studied more than three millions Soviet prisoner of war.
The remains of Ravensbrück in Germany, which was the second-largest concentration camp for women; the largest being the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In January 1945, Ravensbrück had more than 50,000 prisoners from 30 countries
In Nazi-occupied France, the disembarkation station is located in the valley below Natzweiler – Struthof concentration camp. It was home to about 50 subcamps. In 1944, the number of prisoners at the main camp was 7000 and subcamps had 20,000.
A small area located near Kulmhof, an extermination camp in Rzuchowski Forest in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between December 1941, March 1943, and summer 1944, the camp was also called Chelmno by the SS. It housed at least 172,000 victims.
Prisoners from Mauthausen in Nazi-occupied Austria had to jump from this cliff to their death. Camp guards called it the “parachute jump”. Mauthausen had 197,000 inmates, with at least 95,000 of them dying.
Rita Weiss was born in Romania and survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof concentration camps. At her Tel Aviv residence, she stated that “I had survived, I had the ability to remain alive, because I was forced to tell what had happened.”
Radostowitz, a sub-camp for forest prisoners at Auschwitz II-Birkenau was called Radostowitz. The prisoners were responsible for felling the trees that were then transported to Auschwitz IIBirkenau to be used in the crematoria to burn dead bodies. Pictured in 2016 is the location, which was Nazi-occupied Poland.
Dachau was the concentration camp that saw more than 41,000 deaths. This is what remains of Dachau’s barracks. Dachau was founded by Nazis as the first camp to be established. It was in March 1933 that Dachau became the longest operational prison.
Kulmhof, a camp for extermination at Rzuchowski Forest in Nazi-occupied Poland (2015). Bone fragments of burned corpses seep into the soil. The camp saw at most 172,000 deaths between 1941-44. Following the discovery of smells from mass graves in neighboring villages, in 1942, corpses were burnt in open-air ovens.
He added, “These places persist today across these countries. These sites created a path to genocide. They destroyed communities and ghettos as well, and also transit camps for workers, camps for internment, camps for labour, camps for labor, camps of subsistence, camps that were concentration camps for extermination and other camps.
They are interconnected by their surroundings and the journeys they make between them. These sites saw mass killings on an individual basis and massacres at a large scale. The numbers were almost unimaginable.
These are places where life and death were decided, but also these are locations of hope, survival, and memory.
Ben Barkow was the former director of London’s Wiener Holocaust Library. He stated: “The Wiener Library offers many opportunities for artistic responses to Holocaust. I can say unambiguously Marc’s work has been among the most beautiful and sensitive we’ve seen in many decades.”
The house of Amon Göth, the notoriously sadistic commandant of Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. The Austrian Nazi officer was also known as an adversary of Oskar Schindler, who shielded Jews during the Holocaust. He was hanged on 26 June 1946.
Shmuel ATZMON-Wircer, a Holocaust survivor living in Tel Aviv is Shmuel. His family fled to Russia in the conflict, and were forced to work as labourers in Siberia. To preserve Yiddish, he devoted most of his life to Yiddish theater.
The Krakow Ghetto. The ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto in March 1943 saw the SS kill around 2,000 Jews in the ghetto and transfer another 2,000 to the Płaszów concentration camp. More than 3,000 people were also sent to Auschwitz–Birkenau. Most of them died.
Pictured in December 2018, a former site of the Mucachevo ghetto in Ukraine. On August 27 and 28 of 1941, many Jews of Mucachevo were murdered by the Nazis in Kamianets-Podilskyi’s massacre. All the rest were expelled to Auschwitz
Arthur Rose, a Holocaust survivor living in New York. Anna and he escaped from the Ukranian gehetto at Lviv, where it had been liquidated. He then fled to hide. On the eve before liberation, the SS murdered their parents and they fled with the children to Krakow.
The Ancienne Gare de déportation de Bobigny. It was the station that transported French Jews held at Drancy to Auschwitz. This was also where most of them made their final steps on French soil. It’s located in Paris, just outside of Paris.
Grabnik square at Rivne, where 23,500 Jews were assembled and marched 2.5 miles (4km) to Sosenki forest to be killed on November 7, 1941. According to some reports, ditches were dug into the forest by Russian prisoners-of-war prior to the Russian massacre.
It has 736 pages. The foreword is by James Bulgin who heads content at the Holocaust Galleries Imperial War Museums.
MailOnline was told by Mr Wilson that he had “wanted” (or perhaps not realising the need) to create a work on the Holocaust over the past 20 years, since he began taking photos.
He added: “It’s something I thought was important to talk about, share and to begin conversation about. To be truthful, I never believed I was capable of taking the photos required for a topic like this or talking about it properly.
“I didn’t have the right voice nor visual language. In 2015 after finishing my last book, The Last Stand I finally felt that perhaps I did. The visual language was what I had hoped to be able to speak about the tragedy.
“A calm enough voice but insistent to speak about history. It is something that should not only be spoken about, but also must be remembered, ignored or worse denied.
In his second statement, he said that he had some ideas for how the book would be made and the topics to cover. He took them with him when he went to South East France.
This all changed when his second late-afternoon photoshoot was over. He covered his head in a dark cloth and looked through my large format camera’s ground glass screen. It felt “completely and completely wrong” to him. It was wrong.
Wilson said, “My first thought was to photograph these places from afar, in the larger landscape surrounding them as I have done previous work. But these images that I made were not objective, incorrect, cold or calculated.
“But I was aware of what I had done and I didn’t think about it. That morning, I went to the old internment camp and crossed over the border of the mass artworks that had surrounded it. Finally, I entered the space.
“And there, after spending two hours searching for the Barrack ‘K12’, the ex-children’s barrack I finally found my voice. You can see the fading paint on the walls that were painted by children more than 70 years ago. The roof tiles had cracked and there was some grass around it.
“I was given what to do. Tell the children’s stories. One of them. There are many more. These stories could be retold by countless others: 1,000, 1000, or a million.
“I worked there and returned to the UK and had many conversations with people, showing them my work, sharing it, having discussions and planning the next steps.
When asked what it was like to travel to these places, Wilson replied: “Throughout this six-year period of work, I was always aware of how fortunate I was to have this opportunity to visit these destinations. It was my choice whether to work in the area for several weeks or return home.
“So, I allowed them to wash over me. The locations as well as the details of the events I was told by someone there during wartime in our conversations.
“Each place I visit will remain with me, but it’s not possible for me to work successfully on this topic, or this type, at a distance.
These places could be remembered today or lost forever. You can mark the site with a plaque, or build a shopping mall with multiplexes and McDonalds.
“But every one of the more than 150 locations we visited has a story, with its own stories. Nearly all of them are full of tragedy and horror.”
He stated that while he was writing the book, he tried to avoid putting one place over another. Also, not giving any story more significance than another.
Wilson said, “Some places have made a lasting impression on me more than others.” It could be because of the closeness of a location to an incident shared with me personally by one or more of my 22 family members, or simply for how I felt about that particular place.
“In some places it was a faint shadow of a painting on the wall. In another location, in the Kulmhof extermination camps in Rzuchowski Forest, Poland it was human bone fragments seeingping from the soil.
The ashes of murdered prisoner bodies, which were burned to the ground and then crushed as a way to conceal what happened. Every one of these individuals, whether a mother, father or child who was murdered, grandparent, brother, sister, or other family member, is just like us.
He stated that it took him “some time” to be brave enough to speak with Holocaust survivors.
Wilson stated, “But each meeting, every one-hour or four-hour, and in some cases two-day conversation, left me an indelible imprint.” They were kind and compassionate, gentle and strong.
When asked by one of the survivors if there was something that stood out, Wilson replied: “I spent days listening to these people in different languages. I took in every word and glance. I didn’t ask specific questions, but just listened.
“Hearing them share what they had to say with me and sharing what they wish the world to learn. Rita (96) spoke to Rita in December 2017.
Buchenwald’s autopsy table, one of Germany’s largest death camps in 1937. Over 56,000 people, out of the 280,000 held in the camp, were executed by the Soviet troops, starting November 1938.
There are woods just beyond the fence surrounding Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps in Nazi-occupied France. They can be found about 30 minutes south-west from Strasbourg. The camp, constructed in 1941, was enclosed by a 10ft (3m)-high electrified barbed wire fence
A train window from Romania, 2018. The view from a train window in Romania, 2018. The worst was in Iași, with 13,000 killed in June 1941
Near France’s border to Spain, the Camp de Rivesalte interment camp housed Jews from all nationalities, as well as Catalan refugees, and French gypsies. The camp was then used to house captured Germans in prisoner-of war camps.
Photograph taken from Mukachevo, Ukraine. This was in the time when Munkacs were in Czechoslovakia.
Auschwitz, Nazi-occupied Poland. Police and the SS are believed to have sent at least 1.3 million persons to Auschwitz between 1940-1945. Around 1.1 Million people were killed among these.
“After telling me her story, she was deported from her village and placed in an internment camp. She then went on to a series of slave labor camps. Her family was murdered. Finally, there was the Death March in Stuthoff concentration camp. The death march saw her group being put on a barge at the Baltic Sea. They were left without food and water and left to die.
Rita Weiss was a woman who Wilson met in Tel Aviv (Israel) and told Wilson: “In April 1945, they ordered us to leave the camp. We were walking, not on foot. There wasn’t a train or bus. The Death March.
“We arrived at the sea, and there were barsges. We were afraid to go under the water. A barge with prisoners from Norway, Poland, Greece… After one day and one night we did not know what to do. We must learn to swim, said one man.
“We didn’t know the country or whereabouts we were. We just wanted to get out there and swim, so that we could. Either we would drown in the ocean or die from being on the boat, It was imperative that I survived.
‘A Wounded Landscape – Bearing Witness To The Holocaust’ by Marc Wilson is published by two&two press and available for £55 on the author’s website by clicking here