Who were first to establish concentration camps? And was the practice met with near universal international condemnation as soon as they sprung up?
What do you mean by Concentration Camps - because if its simply confining a group of people, we’ve done it for nearly a thousand years with Jewish ghettos. Also American Indian reservations, European poor houses, and probably a bunch more. And no, restricting the movements of groups of people you don’t trust was acceptable standard behavior for hundreds of years.
This quote from the cited Wiki page answers the question about the phrase “concentration camp”:
The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years’ War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American Waralso used concentration camps.
The term “concentration camp” or “internment camp” is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law
Wasn’t Australia one big concentration camp at one point?
The English term “concentration camp” dates from the Second Boer War, when the British penned up Boers and their families in them (with high mortality rates). It was part of the Army’s “scorched earth” tactic to end guerrilla warfare.
The concept of imprisoning your enemies en masse in camps may go back at least to the 1700s in Poland, courtesy of the Russian empire.
Well, the “inmates” could leave any of those at any time, at least with the reservations, on a individual basis.
Generally the British during the Boer wars “invented” the “concentration camp” although there were precursors.
Transit centers are an inevitability: the British used them while organizing the expulsion of the Acadians, the US in the round-up to the Trail of Tears, and the Jews probably went through them prior to the Babylonian Captivity, the Diaspora from Israel, and expulsions from Spain and England. Although that meets the definition of concentration camp, I’m here to learn of the first historical example of “let’s herd them into an enclosure and hold them there,” as opposed to the ancient practice putting cities’ populations to the sword and/or hauling them off into slavery.
No, it was a prison colony from when Sydney was founded in 1788. Only convicted criminals were transported there involuntarily.
My take on “concentration camp” would be that people were put in there for other reasons such as political affiliation, ethnicity, even just family connections. No conviction necessary.
I can’t think of any concentration camps that were met with international condemnation as soon as they sprung up.
I seriously doubt that many international folks even knew about the Japanese-American camps at Manzanar and the like, especially considering that most Americans didn’t even know they existed.
Even the Nazi death camps did not receive international condemnation at first. Most folks outside of Germany didn’t know about them, and many that did know about them brushed off the stories about them as typical wartime propaganda. Jews whose families had been directly impacted by the camps had a hard time convincing anyone about what was really happening. Some people believed the stories, but no one really knew the true scale of the camps and the Holocaust until invading Allied forces stumbled across the camps. After the facts came out there was certainly a lot of international condemnation, but the camps had been running for years prior to that without any major international complaints at all.
Has any concentration camp, of any type, ever been met with international condemnation as soon as they sprung up?