The term “concentration camp” doesn’t arouse pleasant associations. They’re not pleasant when it’s used to describe internment facilities for illegal immigrants in the United States, and they’re not pleasant when it’s applied to the “humanitarian city” that Israel is contemplating constructing in Gaza. Concentration camps are thought of as the invention of Nazi Germany, and even if some Nazi concentration camps were not death camps equipped with gas chambers, hundreds of thousands died in them from starvation, infectious diseases, physical brutality, and sheer exhaustion, while many others were ultimately sent from them to be gassed. To associate the American or Israeli governments with such horrors seems unacceptable.
Yet as a matter of historical record, neither the term “concentration camp” nor the reality it describes started with the Germany of the 1930s. The term goes back to the 1890s when two countries fighting colonial wars, Spain and England, forced large numbers of civilians to leave their homes for prison-like enclosures so as to prevent them from aiding and sheltering enemy forces. For Spain, the conflict was the 1895–98 Cuban War of Independence, which ended with a Spanish defeat hastened by United States intervention in the Spanish-American War of 1898. In the three years of the fighting, the Spanish army herded an estimated half-million rural Cubans into makeshift housing in fortified spaces so as to deny the rebels all access to them. The physical conditions in these camps were wretched, and roughly a third of their inhabitants are believed to have died of hunger, illness, or other causes.
The Spanish called this strategy reconcentración and the enclosures they built reconcentrados, and the English, in carrying out a similar policy in the 1899–1902 Boer War, anglicized this as “concentration camps” while driving 100,000 Boers or Dutch-descended Afrikaners in Transvaal and the Orange Free State—two independent republics that they sought to annex to British South Africa—into tents and tumbledown shacks. The Boer guerillas enjoyed the near-unanimous support of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of these two provinces, and the camps were designed to deprive them of it. As in Cuba, living conditions were abysmal. About 26,000 of their inmates are thought to have died in the camps, along with another 20,000 black Africans who were held in separate facilities.
Thus, when, when the German government, after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, established detention centers for political prisoners—Jews, Communists, socialists, homosexuals, foreigners, and other undesirables—they borrowed from the English the same term that the English had borrowed from the Spanish and called such places Konzentrationslager. Unlike the Spanish and English camps, the German ones had no military purpose. Neither, for that matter, did the Soviet Gulags of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, which functioned, however, more as penal colonies and were a different form of mass incarceration.
The “relocation centers” established by the United States during World War II for its Japanese citizens were not officially called concentration camps, even though this is in effect what they were. Like the Soviet and German camps, they were not part of a military effort; like the Spanish and English ones, they housed families and entire communities, not just arrested individuals. Conditions in them in them, of course, were infinitely better than in any of their predecessors. Although the internees lived in primitive barracks surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they were adequately fed, received medical care, and were not subject to forced labor or to physical harm or abuse. Their mortality rates were not significantly higher than those of the general U.S. population, and while the psychological trauma inflicted on them was great, they were on the whole treated humanely.
Although concentration camps, whether called that or not, have differed greatly, their division into the two main categories of military and non-military has continued to this day. In the former category, one might mention such relatively benign examples as the French agrovilles of the Indochina War, which later morphed into the American “strategic hamlets” of the Vietnam War, in which millions of peasants were made to abandon their homes for resettlement in stockaded villages meant to create a cordon sanitaire between them and Viet Cong insurgents. On the non-military and far less benign side, one can point to the Chinese concentration camps, euphemistically called “Vocational Educational and Training Centers,” to which up to three million Uyghurs and other non-Han Muslims have been sent as part of a Sinicization campaign.
Given the fairly brief time, ranging from a few days to several weeks, spent by most apprehended illegal immigrants to the U.S. in detention centers before being deported or released, these can hardly be called concentration camps, since they are not meant to house permanent or semi-permanent populations. Israel’s “humanitarian city” in Gaza, on the other hand, would be another story. In conception—rounding up and cramming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their families into endless rows of tents in order to create fire-free zones in the rest of an area occupied only by Hamas combatants—it resembles the Spanish reconcentrados and English concentration camps of the Cuban and Boer Wars, while having nothing in common with a Nazi Konzentrationlager.
“Humanitarian,” such a camp would not be. What to call it, however, would matter less than its administration and military effectiveness. The English won the Boer War with the help of concentration camps while inflicting great suffering on those interned in them. The Spanish were as brutal and lost. The problem with history is not that it has no lessons but that the ones it has can be read in opposite ways.
