Ivar Schute

Ivar Schute (b. 1966) has worked for nearly thirty years as an archaeologist in the field of heritage and monument management. While doing so, he has specialized his research in World War II archaeology and has conducted excavations and geophysics at German Nazi camps Amersfoort, Vught, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka (I and II) and Sobibor, in addition to a number of smaller forced labour and transit sites. While he has regularly published articles, taken part in interviews and publicly presented his findings throughout the last ten years, this is his first book.

Unearthing the Holocaust

An Archaeologist’s Search for Buried Traces

(Prometheus, 2020, 224 pages)

It is only within the last two decades that archaeologists have started working on the camps of World War Two. Indeed, for many, archaeology and the atrocities of the Holocaust are not a logical combination, though excavations are now bringing important new information to light in locations with few survivors or records. As Holocaust archaeologist Ivar Schute writes, archaeology offers us an invaluable perspective in a time where Holocaust denial continues to grow: ‘If the Nazis attempted to erase their traces, then they certainly didn’t think like archaeologists.’