Digital Studies of The Holocaust

From Birthplace to Incarceration: Mapping Queer Men Imprisoned by the Third Reich Under Paragraph 175
A collaborative project: led by Dr. Katie Fisher, coded by Prajakta Patankar, with support from Mallikarjun Nagaraja, Amol Bhadane, and Jennifer Cantrell-Sutor

Representing each life as an animated particle, this map visualizes the data kept by the Nazis at two concentration camps—Dachau and Flossenbürg. Rather than limiting the scope of these lives to only the years affected by the Third Reich, this animated map begins with the birth year of the oldest known man kept at these camps for violating paragraph 175, which was the law prohibiting consensual relationships between consenting adult men. The map shows each man’s birth year and location and traces their forced movement into the camp systems. The animation contains a timeline that unfolds alongside the populating map. As the dates near 1945, the particles take on new colors to represent the last known status of each person.

Charting Lives: Memorial Histogram for Queer Men  
Imprisoned in Nazi Germany 1933-1945 
by Dr. Katie Fisher 

Using cotton yarn, wood beads, and colored pins this alternative visualization re-materializes data collected about the lives of nearly 800 men persecuted in Nazi Germany under the law known as Paragraph 175. This project, which blurs the lines between data visualization and art installation, was installed as an act of memorialization over the course of 5 days and by 12 volunteers.
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