Concentration camps by Dan Stone

Author:Dan Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The wide world of camps

A percentage of the continent’s population had become quite accustomed to the thought that they were outcasts. They could be divided into two main categories: people doomed by biological accident of their race and people doomed for their metaphysical creed or rational conviction regarding the best way to organise human welfare.

As Arthur Koestler’s words from his novel Scum of the Earth (1941) make plain, the Third Reich’s and Soviet Union’s camps were not the only ones to exist before and during the Second World War. Japanese camps for Allied soldiers and civilians during the Pacific War, the Croatian camp at Jasenovac, the French internment camps in the south of France, Italy’s island and African camps, and the Romanian occupation of Transnistria, which essentially became a giant, open-air concentration camp, all suggest that the Nazis’ allies were willing users of camps, some more brutal and destructive than others. The democratic countries have also been accused of making use of concentration camps; the charge might have some validity, although here we can see degrees of difference between the Nazi/Soviet camps and the British/American. In the case of the British, one sometimes hears that internment camps for ‘enemy aliens’ or, after the war, the use of internment camps on Cyprus to hold Jewish DPs—Holocaust survivors making the ‘illegal’ journey to Palestine—were concentration camps. In the American case, the wartime decision to intern American citizens of Japanese descent is often discussed using this vocabulary, with books with titles such as Concentration Camps USA being quite common. Were these institutions concentration camps?

After the war, concentration camps rapidly came to appear synonymous with the Third Reich. Yet as we have seen, concentration camps were by no means the invention of the Nazis, nor—if we exclude the death camps—were the Nazis’ camps necessarily more deadly or brutal than those of other regimes. The Third Reich’s characteristics as a whole—Nazism as a political ideology, the ‘racial community’ as an aspiration, the dreams of a German-dominated, racially reordered European empire—were the factors that made Nazism so apocalyptically destructive: the inseparability of word and deed in Nazism. Although the camp system was central to the Nazis’ plans, especially for the creation of a helot population of Slavs who would serve their racial masters, when we consider them purely as institutions in their own right it is hard to say that the Nazi concentration camps were very different from those elsewhere. In fact, we can see that the Nazi camps provided the inspiration for camps in other countries after 1945, as in Argentina and Chile, or communist prison camps such as Piteşti in Romania. Some of the Nazi camps even continued to be used as camps for political prisoners, what the Soviets in their occupation zone of Germany called ‘special camps’.

It is unsurprising, then, that shortly after the war the continued existence of camps in the world was a cause of grave concern to certain groups of intellectuals. In 1950, for example, the newly founded Commission

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