Question about Holocaust category structure

+4 votes
163 views

In line with the categorization project's current efforts to standardize category structure across the board, while reviewing/correcting structure of those belonging to the Holocaust project, it occurred to me that a major change might be needed to bring it into conformance with the overall category structure. 

The current structure is:

    Holocaust

  •  Holocaust Fate Unknown
        (profiles in here)
  • Holocaust Survivors
        (profiles in here)
  • Holocaust Victims
    • Holocaust Victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau
          (profiles in here)
    • Holocaust Victims at Theriesenstadt.
          (profiles in here)
    • (etc.)

The question I have is whether this should be changed to:

    Holocaust

  • Holocaust Fate Unknown
        (profiles in here)
  • Holocaust Survivors
        (profiles in here)
  • Holocaust Victims
        (profiles in here)
  • Holocaust Camps and Ghettos
    • Holocaust Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
          (profiles in here)
    • Holocaust Ghetto at Theriesenstadt
          (profiles in here)
    • (etc)

This would mean that each victim's profile would have at keast 2 Holocaust category links - 1 to Holocaust Victims and 1 to each camp/ghetto in which the person was imprisoned (some of them were moved around to several of these places before being killed).

Making this change will be a big job, but if it's the right way to go then I'm willing to do it.  Would someone from the categorization project please be so kind as to advise whether this is the way the structure should be?

THANX oodles!

in Policy and Style by Gaile Connolly G2G Astronaut (1.2m points)
Gaile, The current structure looks good to me, so I don't understand the reason you are considering the change.  What purpose are you trying to serve?  Also, it would be possible (not likely) that someone whose fate is unknown was at Birkenau or one of the other "camps."
Vic,

Someone whose fate is unknown is a person for whom no information is available as to what became of him/her during the war, according to one or more sources.  Someday, somebody may find some information - at that time, we will know if the person survived or, if a victim, where the person died,  At that time, we will be able to move the person from "fate unknown" to the appropriate category - either Survivors or Victims at xxxx.  Actually, it is very likely that the people in the Fate Unknown category died at one of the camps or ghettos, since nobody has yet found any evidence that they survived.

If a researcher only knows a person was a victim - or if they are looking for a person and try Survivors, then try Fate Unknown, and don't find the person, perhaps it would be good to have a single place where all victims would be so that they could find the person there, instead of having to search each of the 30+ (and still increasing) camps and ghettos individually.

I am not at all knowledgeable about this stuff - I'm very new to genealogy - so I have no way of knowing what the best structure would be.  The change I'm asking about here would bring the Holocaust category structure parallel to the way some of the place categories are structured.
I agree with Vic. You are dealing with such a singular issue that it seems very unlikely that you would gain much from doing this restructuring.

On the contrary, I would be inclined to think that your new structure would open the door to the same mistake the allied forces made in Germany after the war when they originally assigned displaced persons to camps by country of origin and ended up with Jewish concentration camp survivors in the same camps as their former guards.
Helmut,

You have raised an issue that never occurred to me.  So far, the Holocaust project has no categories for the perpetrators and I suppose I've had blinders on because I have become so deeply involved with the large family I have "adopted", with so many members who were either victims or survivors.  I suppose the thought never occurred to me that Nazis were people, too ... I had never considered that someday some of them may have profiles in WikiTree and they would most certainly belong in some Holocaust category, but absolutely need to be very clearly distinguished from those on whom they carried out their atrocities.

Certainly there were far fewer Nazis than all those who suffered at their hands.  Perhaps we won't need to have categories for the individual places where they did ther bad deeds and can just put them in one category called Nazis that would be a subcategory of Holocaust.  If we do need to classify them further, we might make subcategories under Nazis for them.  This would mean, though, that if my suggested change is decided to be the right way to do it then the word "Victims" should probably continue to be part of the name of each of the camps/ghettos.

I'm looking forward to more discussion ... I want to get this right!!!

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