Concentration camps originated in colonial empires, not Nazi Germany

Evidence

For instance, in 1941, Hitler remarked, “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany. It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” He was speaking for propaganda purposes, but with an element of truth. Concentration camps had, in fact, been used in many colonial contexts—by the Spanish in Cuba; by German colonists in Southwest Africa, against the Herero and Nama people; by the British in what is now South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War, with tens of thousands of captives dying in the disease-ridden enclosures. Before Hitler began casting the mass murder of genetic “inferiors” as an act of health care for the race, the British Royal Navy commander Bedford Pim explained to the Anthropological Society of London in 1866 that, when it comes to killing Indigenous peoples, there was “mercy in a massacre.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 881

Categorization

• CANDY: Hitler’s own admission that England invented concentration camps is a sharp, tweetable fact that upends the standard telling.
• XREF: The ‘mercy in a massacre’ logic connects to the reader’s own interest in how genocidal ideologies get justified as benevolent — parallels earlier notes on colonial framing. — connects to: American eugenics served as a model for Nazi Germany — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293