Concentration camps

‘In the future, I believe, when the word concentration camp is used, one will think of Hitler's Germany, and only Hitler's Germany’. Writing in autumn 1933, even so perceptive a diarist as Victor Klemperer could scarcely have imagined where the nascent Nazi camp system would lead. But he was proved largely correct. The images of starving inmates at the camps' liberation, peering uncomprehending through barbed wire amid other-worldly scenes of suffering and death, are seared into the global consciousness. Klemperer's diary entry, of course, also registers his awareness of similar carceral institutions elsewhere. He was almost certainly thinking of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), when the British Army's use of concentration camps to intern Boer civilians had sparked public outrage in Germany. The Nazi regime, chafing at purported ‘atrocity propaganda’ abroad about its camps, made much of this grim precedent. In this elegant and compact book, therefore, the prolific Holocaust historian Dan Stone poses a highly pertinent question: what is a concentration camp? The answer is anything but simple. He charts a deft path between the twin hazards of a definition so expansive that the concept is drained of analytical value, and of particularizing the Nazi camps to the extent that they appear sequestered from broader historical processes. He opens, however, with a decidedly inauspicious ‘working definition’ of the concentration camp as ‘an isolated circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians’ (p. 4) which is much too loose and fails to differentiate the camp from normative ‘total institutions’ (Erving Goffman) such as prisons and asylums. Fortunately, Stone moves away from this position throughout the book. He rightly stresses a colonial genealogy to the concentration camp stretching back to the violent depopulation and transfers of indigenous peoples to reservations and island prisons in Australia and the United States. This provides historical context to the better-known use of camps in Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s, as well as the British and German camps in Africa in the following decade

Expansive · Gulag · Nazi concentration camps · Nazism · Outrage · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · History · Law