Concentration Camps

I was watching a program with a debate over what the heck is a 'Concentration Camp'? It seems some Congresswoman had said that some undocumented aliens coming into the US over the southern border were being put in concentration camps. Stephen D. Malzberg derided her, saying 'Concentration Camps', by definition, must have gas chambers and crematoria, and that did not apply to the places she was calling 'Concentration Camps'. Malzberg has no knowledge of history.

First, a German confined in what was called a 'Concentration Camp' in Germany in the 1930s described it as a minimum security prison (and his description is misused by Holocaust Deniers). The German Concentration Camps did not become Death Camps until the 1940s, mostly after 1941, but they were still called Concentration Camps when they were used as minimum security prisons for German Aryan prisoners.

Second, when the US declared that the Japanese who had been born in the US (and their parents who came from Japan years ago) were not Japanese-Americans but Japanese enemy agents to be confined for the duration of the war, and maybe longer, the name of the confinement facilities was 'Concentration Camps,' and these camps still exist, and some are now being used to confine some of the undocumented persons crossing the southern US border.

Malzberg has a popular show on Newsmax, and he makes things very simple for his audience, simple, popular, and historically incorrect.

Since those confinement facilities for Japanese de-Americanised Americans were called Concentration Camps during WWII, and are still listed as Concentration Camps in the history books and still retain the name on the Federal description, I think it is not outrageous or even wrong to call them Concentration Camps.

Which leads to the charge that the Gaza is a Concentration Camp, something Malzberg strongly denies. About 50% of those confined in Gaza are malnourished. Gaza has no gas chambers, no crematoria (the religions inside Gaza mostly insist on burials), but the US examples and the German examples from the 1930s show that one can have a Concentration Camp with neither gas chambers nor crematoria. Gaza isn't that minimum security a prison, and there is mass malnutrition, so it can be compared to the American Concentration Camps and to the German Concentration Camps before 1941 (after 1941, German Concentration Camps became Death Camps, where prisoners were starved and forced to do hard labour until they could no longer work, then gassed and cremated; Gaza wasn't that bad until October of 2023, with inmates now being executed in mass, but Malzberg would say bombing and shooting and dropping gas from aeroplanes isn't the same as the Nazi gas chambers, and the dead are not being cremated in mass crematoria, so no comparison, definitely not a Concentration Camp).

We know all about the Nazi Concentration/Death Camps because they were liberated, first some of the Eastern-most Concentration Camps were liberated by the Red Army of the USSR, and then some of the more Westerly Camps were liberated by the Western Army of the US and UK (and a few Free French troops). So we know all about the horrors.

We don't know much about the US Concentration Camps since they were never liberated by an enemy Army that publicised their crimes. I spoke to an inmate who told me the guards were told to keep the prisoners confined to their cells, and they had enough food to feed the inmates an adequate diet for about three months that was to last a year. The US guards at his Concentration Camp, not good at 'just following orders', took up a collection from among themselves (the Japanese-American prisoners had all their money confiscated before being confined), bought seeds and eggs and agricultural equipment, and had the prisoners farm the Concentration Camp grounds. They ran through the food that was supposed to last a year in three months, but by that time the first crops and chickens were available, and, being good farmers, the Japanese-American prisoners managed to feed themselves.

I know what happened at that one American Concentration Camp because a survivor told me, but he did not know what happened at any of the other Concentration Camps, and, again, no enemy army liberated any of the Camps, so we don't have any verified horror stories. Only the one example where the guards begged the prisoners not to tell anyone that they were allowed to farm and feed themselves since that had been strictly prohibited. (I learned this 40 years after the Camps were closed from a man who had been a young Japanese-American boy confined in an American Concentration Camp during WWII.)