Murderous Mindscapes: Toward a Spatial Understanding of Complicity in the Holocaust

Can we intuit mental positions toward participation in murder by using geographic positions in killing?  Is it possible to draw conclusions about a perpetrator’s motivations by their spatial relation to the Holocaust and/or the physical way in which they make sense of their activities?  This presentation will seek to address these questions by looking at how German Army soldiers complicit in the Holocaust made sense of their actions.  Further, I will discuss how an interdisciplinary influence from geography can lead historians to both ask new questions of their sources and to visualize historical data in new and unconventional ways.