Who invented and run the first concentration camp?

Question

I think it must have been done by real civilized people.Don`t you think?

Answer 1

There's a world of difference between the British and Nazi 'concentration camps'. The British camps in the Boer war were prison camps; designed to hold people, not kill them.

The Nazi camps in WW2 were for killing people, 6 million in total, mostly by gassing. These are better described as death/extermination camps.

Saying 'Britain had the first concentration camps' is accurate only in the sense of the it meaning 'prison camps'.

Answer 2

People confuse "concentration camp" with "death camp". A concentration camp really is just anywhere where civilians are forcibly concentrated. The British are credited with the first modern form of this in the Boer War, although there must have been many other examples throughout the world's miserable history.

The Nazi death camps, as at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor were fairly unique in that people were sent their to be killed in an industrial fashion, rather than just be killed on the spot. The Nazis also had a network of forced labour camps, transit camps, etc. In all of them, conditions were barbarous in the extreme.

Although the British camps in SA were certainly nothing to be proud of, the poor conditions arose from the chaos and disease brought about by warfare, which was considered to be inevitable at that period, rather than from a deliberate attempt to dehumanise and destroy as in the case of the Nazis.

Answer 3

I nominate the Romans. Professor Robin Birley of the Vindolanda Trust
has proposed that the remains of 100 circular huts at the site of
the Roman fort known as Vindolanda (in Northumberland) were actually
a concentration camp, holding ancient Scottish families as hostages.
The Romans suppressed a native uprising between 193 and 211 AD in
the region between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

References:
(i) The Herald (Glasgow) (2 August 1997 p3):
`Riddle of Vindolanda fort: ancient Scots may have been held
hostage in Roman Empire's only concentration camp'

(ii) The Scotsman (2 August 1997 p22):
`Romans invented concentration camps for Scots'

A more well-known example is the "reconcentrados" of Imperial Spain, used to put down an
uprising of the Cubans in 1895 - 1898. The effects were rather gruesome:

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/reconcentrado.htm

There's a description of the Spanish camps here, made by US Senator
Redfield Proctor. It appears in Clara Barton's THE RED CROSS,
entitled 'Concentration Camps of Cuba 1895-1898'.

http://www.amigospais-guaracabuya.org/oagld003.php

However, even though 211AD and 1895 are before 1899, many people
claim the British invented concentration camps in the Second Anglo Boer
War (1899 - 1902). This claim originates with the Nazis and has proved much
more popular than the facts.

"The persistent belief that the British invented concentration camps has been
the war's most enduring propaganda issue."

Source: Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present
By Nicholas John Cull, David Holbrook Culbert, David Welch

The Nazis are obsessed with this because they want to pretend that they were led astray by
the British and accidentally carried out the Holocaust due to our bad example, but there's no
causal link between the Boer War and the Holocaust. The Holocaust has its roots in
German colonial camps in Africa.

Source: Anne Applebaum, in GULAG A HISTORY

"As not everybody remembers, the Germans briefly had African colonies:
one of them was Deutsche Sud-West Afrika, now Namibia. The territory
was populated by the Herero, a tribe whose presence the Germans resented;
not only did their numbers hampered white settlement, but their presence
violated the ethnic purity of the new "German" state. At first, the
colonial policy was simply to slaughter the Herero. To some of the German
colonists, this seemed inefficient."

"the Herero were duly driven into concentration camps. But the Herero were not merely starved.
They also died of exhaustion, carrying out forced labour on behalf of the German colony.
At the beginning of 1905, there had been 14,000 Herero in captivity. By the end of that year,
half were dead."

Because of the Herero, the word Konzentrationslager first appeared in
German, in 1905. It was also in these African camps that the first
German medical experiments were conducted on human beings. Two of Joseph
Mengele's teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, carried out
research on the Herero, the latter in an attempt to prove his theories
about the superiority of the white race. Nor was he alone in his beliefs.
In 1912, a best-selling German book, German Thought in the World, claimed
that nothing "can convince reasonable people the preservation of a tribe
of South African kaffirs is more important for the future of humanity
than the expansion of the great European nations and the white race in
general," and that "it is only when the indigenous peoples have learned
to produce something of value in the service of the superior race..that
they can be said to have a moral right to exist."

The resemblance to the racist language of the Holocaust is clear enough;
there was, in addition, one further strange coincidence. The first
imperial commissioner of Deutsche Sud-West Afrika was one Dr Heinrich
Goering the father of Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1933."

Nazis are a hoot - you should hear them whining about Dresden. They never heard of The Blitz.

Answer 4

wow... "real civilized people"?

I'll Answer you anyhow, just in case you aren't a Neo-Nazi goofball: and I'm going to say: Egypt maybe 4-5,000 years ago.. and they built the Great Pyramids over 20 years.. with tons of stones needing 10,000s of men for chiseling, etc. and some serious grunt work. THAT takes some serious organization, serious collecting of poor & helpless people, feeding & using them to Concentrate for DECADES on what you're making them do in theory, although the unskilled probably died within months or parts of years, in THAT heat)... I'm going to say that many didn't get out alive, and that tribes around Northern Africa were most probably eliminated as a result.

PS -- Anyone ever meet an Assyrian?

Answer 5

The concept of the concentration camp is as old as the concept of slavery. A conquered or defeated people could have been inslaved en mass and kept in one location such as a mine to work till exhaustion and death. To me, this would be a concentration camp.

Answer 6

believe it or not, people have been intelligent and civilized way longer than you think or could possibly imagine. look at ancient artifacts, read philosophy...probably much more civilized. and when it comes to astronomy/astrology among other things were smarter to some degree...they are still learning things from the ancients and their knowledge of the heavens.

Answer 7

The /term/ was coined by the Brits around the turn of the last century.

Later, the Nazi's used it euphamistically to describe the camps used in thier systematic extermination of segments of the population they deemed undesireable.

Answer 8

The British had the first concentration camp

Answer 9

It was the brits, many have said Egypt but myth says slaves built the pyramids but it isn't true. Most of the people who built them could read and write because a program on the discovery channel shows a sort of diary from about 50 of the men in one of the groups (and I doubt slaves would have been able to write). Also, the people who worked on the pyramids ran sort of hospitals for the people injured. I cant think they would have used slave labour and gone around whipping people because it wouldn't be productive to have a load of people dying every day. Anyway (rambling on a bit :) - britain started the camps in africa)

Answer 10

I believe it was the British in South Africa in their fight against the Boars (sp?)

I know the British had concentration camps during this action, just am not 100% sure if these were the first.