What counts as a "concentration camp"?

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about ICE’s plan to double immigrant detention in the U.S. by acquiring warehouses and turning them into camps, how that accelerates the current concentration camp system, and ways to disrupt that plan. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

Today, I want to write about people’s frequent discomfort around using the words “concentration camp." Avoiding the term often rises out of an honorable impulse yet can have terrible consequences. I hope to come at the question from a different angle than the usual conversations, which sometimes fail to explore the issue in a deeper way.

Why look at this issue now? Yesterday, I saw a video from January, in which a bookstore owner in Minneapolis was interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN. Asked about the planned walkouts and shutdowns that day, the bookstore owner dove right into the crisis.

“Well Jake, we can’t do business as usual right now anyway,” he says, “because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours, uh, to send them to concentration camps.” The bookstore owner talks about other businesses whose staff or customers are afraid to be out on the street.

Then Tapper jumps in. “Just one note. I’m not going, I’m not gonna defend ICE,” he says, “but, I’m, I’m not a big fan of people using the words ‘concentration camp’ to, to describe detention camps. It has a very specific meaning in terms of—.”

The bookstore owner doesn’t wait for him to finish, but interrupts:

“Well they take people to—I understand that—but they take people to Fort Snelling here which literally was built as a concentration camp, and Alligator Alcatraz, which I think we can all agree is a concentration camp. I’m not saying they're Dachau. I'm not saying they're putting people in ovens yet, but these are concentration camps.”

***

After watching that video last night, I posted on Bluesky that I wish I could talk to Jake Tapper on CNN about this history. That is, of course, unlikely to happen. He doesn’t seem inclined to think through this fraught question in a serious way on air, and there’s no connection between us that might lead him to talk to me.

But I wasn’t just picking a fight. I think it’s an important conversation to have, and I wish someone famous who has strong feelings about it would have a good-faith discussion with someone who knows the history well. And even in our era of shattered journalism, television still reaches so many people.

For those who think that Jake Tapper simply doesn’t know or understand concentration camp history at all, I can’t speak to the profundity of his awareness, but it’s clear he’s familiar with parts of the larger story.

In the summer of 2019, I had a conversation with Esquire’s Jack Holmes about events underway at the border during Trump’s first administration and how they related to concentration camp history. That Esquire piece was cited by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on social media, to frame her use of the term “concentration camp” for what was happening at the border.

In an interview Tapper did a week later on CNN with Ocasio-Cortez, he laid out his problem with using the term to apply to contemporary immigrant detention.

“What do you say to Americans,” he said, “especially survivors of the Holocaust or individuals who are related to survivors of the Holocaust who say, ‘Look, academically you’re right, the term concentration camp did not necessarily mean death camp. But colloquially, when most people hear it, they think death camp, they think Holocaust. And you’re undermining your argument and you’re hurting us—hurting our feelings and hurting our emotions and hurting our memories’?”

***

By protecting this term, Tapper may, as a Jewish man or simply as a human being, feel that he’s honoring past suffering and history. And he very well might be. Yet I would argue that in this case, as a journalist, as someone who understands that concentration camps were the forerunners of death camps, as someone with a national audience, he has a higher burden to share that knowledge with others rather than correct someone whose neighbors have been shot dead in the face or the back, or dragged off by masked men before being spirited away to gruesome sites of mass detention far from home, while the government avoids accountability for its actions.

Rooted in the undeniable uniqueness of the Holocaust, Tapper’s view isn’t uncommon in the Jewish community, or even outside it. But as I know from my own work, the bookseller’s view is also very much held by many Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. Rabbis, Jewish studies programs, Holocaust memorial educational foundations, and Holocaust museums alike have brought me in to talk about concentration camp history and how it fits in with what is happening in the United States now.

In these discussions, I often begin by tracing the half-century between the earliest modern concentration camps and the extermination camp at Auschwitz, to try to help people understand how humanity descended to such atrocities after the invention of barbed wire and automatic weapons. And I hope my words are useful. But many times they’re hardly necessary for others to recognize events in the U.S. today as repeating grim history.

Yesterday, just a few miles away from me, “Jews Against ICE” marchers demonstrated in front of ICE headquarters, some holding signs that read, “Never Again Is Now.” USA Today reported that Beth Rubin, 67, drove six hours join the demonstration, because of the parallels to her own family’s trauma in the 1930s.

"We lost 17 people in different concentration camps," she said. "What is happening today to immigrants, to citizens, to innocent people, and to people who have overstayed their visas, to the undocumented and the documented is very similar to what happened then."

***

In such a fraught moment, with detention camps already in existence and with planned warehouse-style expansions, I think looking at this question through a historic lens is useful. This question of whether or not it’s moral or appropriate to use the term “concentration camp” has been asked and answered again and again, long before the Nazis ever seized power.

In fact, the question was asked from almost the first moment it was possible to compare one set of such camps to the next. The first, rough model of modern concentration camps took place under the policy of reconcentración in Cuba in the 1890s. Just a few years later, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, several newspapers compared the new British system of camps there to the prior Spanish model. Many newspapers recognized the similarities between the camps holding Boers and the Cuban camps for reconcentrados—and in some cases, approved of the them. Others denied the new camps were concentration camps at all, echoing today’s arguments.

In London, politicians like David Lloyd George denounced Parliament for refusing to call them concentration camps or to acknowledge what the country was doing. “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man,” he said, “than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.”

Long before the Nazis rose to power, Hitler made multiple direct references to prior camp systems. Along with later imaginative leaps incorporating visions of Native American forced relocation and removal (which, of course, had led to genocide as well), Hitler spoke before an audience of 2,000 at the Münchner Kindl-Keller Brewery in September 1920 about the idea of camps to detain his enemies, noting that “in South Africa, the British deported 76,000 women and children to concentration camps.”

In even earlier writing, from 1919, he imagined turning German Jews into foreigners in their home country, so that they would lose the privileges and protections of citizenship. In 1922, he recalled the recent internment camps of World War I. Speaking of Jewish politicians and their allies whom he felt were not sufficiently patriotic, he said, “The Jews should learn how it feels to live in concentration camps.”

He meant the kinds of concentration camps that had already existed. Those were the Nazi models. It was only malice, impunity, and time that turned them into what they became.

***

When Jake Tapper says that other camps may qualify as concentration camps on a technical, academic level, but that when most Americans hear the term, they think only about death camps, he’s not wrong about the general public’s perception. But if he accepts the public ignorance, it puts him at odds with his job as a journalist, which is not to coddle ignorance. And it puts him in a bind that I’ve never seen him acknowledge—one that’s difficult to finesse.

The sheer magnitude of death at Auschwitz—where some 1.1 million humans, approximately a million of them Jewish detainees, were murdered—reset humanity’s notion of what a concentration camp was. It took many years before the extent of the horror that had happened there was clearly laid out. But once the knowledge became widespread, the site was rightly recognized as a revolution in depravity when it came to concentration camps.

The staggering toll of the Holocaust established it as a singular event, and in the decades that followed, nothing else seemed to qualify in the public’s mind as a concentration camp. The four decades of camps that had preceded Auschwitz were forgotten by many Americans.

Of course historians remembered; reality didn’t vanish. But with the general failure to remember that Auschwitz was literally part of the Nazi concentration camp system before the extermination camp at Birkenau was ever built, people lost sight of how such evil found its way into the world.

Those early Nazi camps made the extermination camps possible. They existed for years, as the cruelties inside them expanded, providing the bureaucratic systems, personnel, and tactics that led to the Holocaust. And those pre-death-camp German camps were in many respects very similar to other concentration camp systems that have existed around the world on several continents.

They were also very similar to the camps the U.S. is currently filling and building. Seamus Culleton, an Irishman detained for months in Camp East Montana in Texas, describes lack of food and violence, calling the facility a “modern day concentration camp.” Three deaths have taken place there so far—one already ruled a homicide—and the ACLU has reported sexual assaults and beatings.

The conditions of camp detention will always worsen over the long haul, and the conditions in U.S. camps are already terrifying. But the key thing to look at is less the starting conditions in them than how individuals arrive there.

If you were swept off the streets in vans by secret police wearing masks; if your initiation into detention involved transit camps meant to hide your departure and effectively disappear you from legal help, temporarily or forever; if you are held with others who are denied due process; and if you are detained with people who have predominantly been rounded up more on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation than for any criminal charge you have in common, you are in a concentration camp. It is only a question of what stage concentration camp you are in, and whether you will be stuck there until the camp is allowed to transform into its next nightmare form.

Concentration camps are a process, one that can be interrupted at the beginning but less easily further along, and often only at dreadful cost. That’s why this conversation matters.

***

So if Jake Tapper wants to say that “death camp” is the standard that must be met for something to be called a concentration camp, does he really not believe that the many other Nazi camps where people were hounded into suicide, tortured, forced to labor in cruel conditions, or even executed before 1942 count as concentration camps? What about those who lost their lives, family, health, or sanity in those camps? Do the dead of Dachau—which was not an extermination camp—not count? Would Jake Tapper say that detainees there were never in a concentration camp?

If Tapper wants to argue that the Holocaust itself is the determining factor, and that even camps that were not extermination camps but were associated with the Holocaust can also retroactively be included as concentration camps, another problem arises.

I suppose it’s possible to argue that the detainees in pre-1942 concentration camps in Germany count as having been in camps because the larger Nazi camp system eventually had the extermination camp system appended to it, evolving into something horrific and unprecedented that then encompasses them.

Yet those early Nazi camps had much in common with prior camps outside Germany—as well as camps we have in the U.S. now and foreign prison camps to which we have rendered detainees. At what point in the course of history did camps like Dachau become concentration camps in Tapper’s mind? Was it the several years in which they were called concentration camps in Germany and around the world, before the death camps could even be imagined? Or was it only after the fact, a kind of retroactive symbolic naming after the horrific threshold was crossed?

If we can’t use the name for these camps that ties them to their historical forebears in Germany, in Russia, and on every continent save Antarctica, we cut off one key path to understanding what happened. We can no longer see what’s coming or identify the pattern by which one camp system becomes a worse kind, each shift following the other until the camps are finally shuttered.

A key part of the reason for using the term concentration camp is to prevent mass death from happening by identifying the pattern as it emerges. We’re now seeing the rise of a secret police loyal to the supreme leader. We’re seeing the targeting of a vulnerable group on the basis of identity, and threats or violence against those who dissent. We’re seeing the creation and massive expansion of detention camps without due process. And yet many people don’t understand where this is headed, because they don’t know the pattern that has held all over the world for more than a century.

If the only way to identify concentration camps and name them, if the qualifying criteria must be that they have already lain at the heart of a genocide, what good are these conversations at all? Are we really honoring the memory of the dead by sacrificing the living?

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