British concentration camps in the South African War killed almost thirty thousand civilians.

Evidence

It was a brutal war in which British troops fought Boer guerrillas. The British burnt down thousands of Boer farms, slaughtering people and cattle as they swept through the land. Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were moved into concentration camps, in which almost thirty thousand people died. Many simply starved to death. These concentration camps were the first of their kind, the progenitors of Hitler’s extermination camps for Jews. Several years later, after he returned to India, when Gandhi wrote about the South African war in his memoirs, he suggested that the prisoners in the camps were practising a cheerful form of satyagraha (which was the course of action he prescribed to the Jews of Germany too): — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 193

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Boer War concentration camps preceded Hitler’s extermination camps (similarity 0.87)
• Gandhi read Boer camp suffering as cheerful satyagraha (similarity 0.79)
• Concentration camps originated in colonial Boer War, not totalitarianism (similarity 0.78)