The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today joined with Google to unveil an online mapping initiative aimed at furthering awareness and action in the Darfur region of Sudan.

'Crisis in Darfur', enables more than 200 million Google Earth mapping service users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in the area. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth. This information will appear as a Global Awareness layer in Google Earth starting today.

'Crisis in Darfur' is the first project of the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield said, "Educating today's generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world's record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most."

Crisis in Darfur content comes from a range of sources—the U.S. State Department, non-governmental organizations, the United Nations, individual photographers, and the Museum. The high-resolution imagery in Google Earth enables users to zoom into the region to view more than 1,600 damaged and destroyed villages, providing visual, compelling evidence of the scope of destruction. The remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed by the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese forces are clearly visible. Humanitarian organizations and others now have a readily accessible tool for better understanding the situation on the ground in Darfur.

With this release, the Museum also announced the creation of a similar mapping project on Holocaust history available on the Museum's website: http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth. The Holocaust took place across the entire European continent, and for all of Europe's Jews, as well as other victims of Nazism, geography played a major role in determining their fate. The Museum is using Google Earth to map key Holocaust sites with historic content from its collections, powerfully illustrating the enormous scope and impact of the Holocaust. Further information on Holocaust-era sites can be accessed through the Museum's online Holocaust Encyclopedia at http://www.ushmm.org/.

To find Crisis in Darfur on Google Earth, users must download the Google Earth application at no cost from http://earth.google.com/. Once downloaded, users will find Crisis in Darfur by flying over Africa. Information on the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative and the Holocaust mapping layer can be accessed from the Museum's Web site at http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth.