{"id":13026,"date":"2025-11-17T08:20:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin-new\/?post_type=campus_story&p=13026"},"modified":"2025-11-17T08:20:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:20:22","slug":"uw-eau-claire-research-team-featured-in-national-geographic-and-bbc-documentaries","status":"publish","type":"campus_story","link":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/story\/uw-eau-claire-research-team-featured-in-national-geographic-and-bbc-documentaries\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Eau Claire research team featured in National Geographic and BBC documentaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Harry Jol, professor of geography, and a team of research students are featured in a National Geographic documentary that highlights the team\u2019s use of ground-penetrating radar to locate mass graves of the Holocaust at sites across Eastern Europe.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire have rare and unique research opportunities. We discover examples of this every semester. From therapeutic gloves for Parkinson\u2019s disease patients to building a robotic dog or tracking the changing landscape in a Minnesota flood plain, Blugolds do it all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But this is a first: Dr. Harry Jol, professor of geography, and a team of research students are featured in a National Geographic documentary that highlights the team\u2019s use of ground-penetrating radar to locate mass graves of the Holocaust at sites across Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

Streaming on the National Geographic channel since mid-September, \u201cThe Hidden Holocaust<\/a>\u201d features several scenes and interviews depicting Jol\u2019s ongoing research project called\u00a0The Holocaust Mapping Program<\/a>, work he and students have been conducting for more than seven years in places like Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, along with other locations in the former Soviet Union.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jol\u2019s ongoing research has been funded through the International Fellows Program at UW-Eau Claire, the L.E. Phillips Family Foundation and University Foundation donor Jeff Liddicoat. Jol’s work also has been supported by numerous in-country partners, such as the Jews in Latvia Museum and the Uniting Foundation of Latvia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis National Geographic documentary is actually drawn from a different documentary by the BBC, called \u2018How the Holocaust Began<\/a>,\u2019\u201d Jol explains.<\/p>\n

This earlier film includes the team working in additional sites and with a strong focus on the tragic story from Alytus, Lithuania, where a suspected 8,000 people were executed in mass burial pits in the woods outside the town.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of the sites we work on are ever excavated, but the radar imagery allows for estimates of death tolls,\u201d Jol says. \u201cThe story that eventually unfolded is truly unimaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The specific footage featuring the UW-Eau Claire team in the National Geographic and BBC films was shot in 2022, and the American research team that summer included:<\/p>\n