Concentration Camps

by Jack R. Johnson 07.2025

The history of concentration camps and death camps are inevitably intertwined, birthed at the same time from the singular Spanish word, reconcentración on the small island of Cuba in 1872.  

Spain was battling an intractable insurgency in Cuba and the Governor General of Cuba asked the Spanish prime minister to help him “isolate rebels” from the agrarian peasantry. Since the general, Arsenio Martinez Campos couldn’t capture the guerillas, he figured the next best thing was too lock up all the civilians who were feeding the guerillas and sometimes sheltering them.  As The New York Times put it, “If he [Campos] cannot make successful war upon the insurgents, he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”

 That was more or less the strategy, which was named reconcentración. Curiously, although he proposed this as a solution, Campos really didn’t want to carry out the remedy.  According to Andrea Pitzer writing for Smithsonian magazine, “He [Campos] wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. ‘I cannot,’ he wrote, ‘as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.’”

But another general was ready to carry out the plan, General Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” In short order Weyler, “the Butcher” forced tens of thousands of civilians to move into the reconcentracion camps. Under Weyler's policy, the rural population had eight days to move into designated camps and any person who failed to obey was shot.

Unfortunately, among those who complied, at least 30% perished from lack of proper food, sanitary conditions, and medicines. C. W. Russell, an attache of the Department of Justice of the United States, went to Cuba shortly after the order for reconcentration went into effect and reported the result of his investigations:

"The spectacle at the Fossos and Jacoba houses, of women and children emaciated to skeletons and suffering from diseases produced by starvation, was sickening.” In Guadaloupe, he wrote, “Reconcentrados lay everywhere under the broiling sun. The mule picked his way between human heaps that looked like so many little mounds of rags. Skeleton legs and arms protruded from out the heaps. Soft moans of mothers and the wailing of little children gave evidence of so many living deaths.” All told, horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

After the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898 (the official casus belli for U.S. entry into the Spanish-American war) President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

But the burdens of Empire are complicated, and after the U.S. entered the war and promptly defeated Spain in three months, they picked up its colonies, including the Philippines, and there, too, insurgents fomented revolution. Turns out, when presented with an intractable insurgency, the reconcentration camps were an effective military solution, albeit brutal, on the occupants. As one U.S. Army officer wrote of the Philippine concentration camps, “It seems […] like some suburb of hell.” Historians place the number killed anywhere from 200,000 to 1,000,000 people. It was at these camps in the Philippines, by the way, that the U.S Army developed the so called “water-cure” torture, known today as water-boarding. 

The U.S. wasn’t the only country making use of reconcentration camps during this time. The basic concept spread to Africa where the British put reconcentration camps to use during the Boer war.  In 1900, the British began forcing more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, behind barbed wire into bell tents or improvised huts.  

In neighboring German colonies in South West Africa, “the Herero people and later the Nama people as well—were herded into concentration camps to face forced labor, inadequate rations, and lethal diseases. Before the camps were fully disbanded in 1907, German policies managed to kill some 70,000 Namibians in all, nearly exterminating the Herero.”

World War 1 escalated the tendency to use concentration camps to isolate and surveil suspicious populations across Europe and in the U.S. After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith “took revenge, locking up tens of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian “enemy aliens” in England.” Germany retaliated in kind, with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa, as well. 

The Ottoman government made use of concentration camps “with inadequate food and shelter to deport Armenians into the Syrian desert as part of an orchestrated genocide.”  Estimates of one million or more Armenians were murdered in this manner.

In the U.S., German nationals were automatically classified as enemy aliens. Two of four main World War I-era internment camps were located in Hot Springs, North Carolina, and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer wrote that, "All aliens interned by the government are regarded as enemies, and their property is treated accordingly."

By the end of the war, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in concentration camps, with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote regions. The conditions for these camps had nominally improved, with visits by the Red Cross and even mail delivery, so that an internment was not necessarily a death sentence. 

But then, of course, came World War II and the Nazi run concentration camps which were more accurately described as death camps. The names Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz have become synonymous with mass murder.

During this period, concentration camps were used elsewhere, but with much better conditions. In the U.S. there were Japanese internment camps and the Soviet Union developed their own gulag of camps—not pleasant but not an automatic death sentence, either. 

 Unlike General Campos, we made a choice a long time ago to use this particular tool of war, even if the inhabitants suffered. In the 1960s, the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam was an effort similar to the reconcentrations in Cuba, isolating the guerillas fighters from the villagers that supported them.  The hamlets were not death camps, but were probably slightly worse than the Japanese internment camps, but likely far better than the treatment of the Native Americans, resettled against their will along The Trail of Tears. A trail that ended in Oklahoma for some, and for many others, that ended in the grave. 

When reports of  sickness and death start piling up from our shiny new concentration camps in the mosquito swarmed everglades (Alligator Alcatraz), or from our far flung gulag stretching from El Salvador (Bukele’s bootcamp) to Sudan, remember: it’s a tool of war we’ve used for centuries. Many times in these camps, death isn’t an accident; it’s an intention.