What counts as a concentration camp?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next Comes What – "What counts as a concentration camp?" Host: Andrea Pitzer
Date: March 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by author and historian Andrea Pitzer, explores the fraught and contentious question: What counts as a concentration camp? Drawing on historical research, recent U.S. events, and public debates—particularly around language used to describe detention facilities under Trump-era immigration policies—Pitzer examines why the term “concentration camp” elicits discomfort, the danger of narrowing its definition, and what history can teach us about recognizing warning signs before mass atrocities. The conversation is anchored by a critique of media figures such as Jake Tapper and includes insights from historians, activists, former detainees, and Jewish community representatives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Controversy Over Language and Definitions

• Discomfort in Terminology:

  • Andrea Pitzer notes people’s reluctance to use “concentration camp,” often “an honorable impulse, yet can have terrible consequences.” (00:25)
  • Jake Tapper objects to “concentration camp” in current debates:

    "I'm not a big fan of people using the term concentration camp to describe detention camps. That has a very specific meaning." – Jake Tapper (00:00)

• Academic Definition vs. Public Perception:

  • Pitzer (citing her book) defines concentration camps as:

    "Mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done." (02:59)

  • Tapper counters, highlighting Holocaust survivor concerns:

    "Colloquially, when most people hear it, they think death camp, they think Holocaust." (04:40)

2. History of Concentration Camps: Beyond the Holocaust

• Origins and Precedents:

  • Concentration camps long predate Nazi Germany:
    • Spanish in Cuba (1890s), British in South Africa (Boer War, 1900s), U.S. forced relocation of Native Americans, Soviet Gulag, U.S. Japanese internment.
    • Newspapers and politicians debated the term from the beginning, often for political convenience or denial. (09:27–10:19)
    • David Lloyd George:

      "There is no greater delusion... than to apply the term refugee to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration." (10:19)

• Nazi Appropriation of the Concept:

  • Hitler publicly referenced British and American camp systems before seizing power, envisioning similar solutions for those he deemed 'enemies.'

    "He said the Jews should learn how it feels to live in concentration camps. He meant the kind of concentration camps that already existed in the world. They were literally on six continents. Those were the Nazi models." – Andrea Pitzer (11:49)

3. Contemporary U.S. Detention Centers

• Parallels in Modern America:

  • Bookstore owner Jamie Schweiz Nettle describes ICE raids and facilities:

    "I'm not saying they're Dachau, I'm not saying they're putting people in ovens yet, but these are concentration camps." (02:05)

  • Frank Abe, Japanese-American activist, draws direct connections:

    "These warehouses, by any objective means, are nothing but 21st century American concentration camps." (22:37)

• First-Hand Accounts and Conditions:

  • Overcrowding, medical neglect, lack of due process, deaths, and trauma—all echo features of earlier concentration camp systems. (15:24–16:44)
  • Former detainees describe conditions as “inhumane,” reporting abuse, suicides, and despair.

4. The Stakes of Language: Why the Term Matters

• Recognition and Prevention:

  • The reluctance to name camps accurately can obscure historical patterns, preventing intervention before atrocities escalate:

    "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." – Andrea Pitzer (23:01)

  • The danger in reserving the term solely for Nazi death camps:

    "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?" – Andrea Pitzer (23:01)

• Jewish Community Responses:

  • A representative stresses inclusivity in remembering all historical experiences with concentration camps:

    "If we do not also talk about Japanese internment, if we don't talk about the Boer War...then we also erase the suffering of those people." (05:16)

5. Learning from History to Avert Atrocity

• Historical Blind Spots:

  • Polling during the 1940s and today show widespread ignorance about the Holocaust and earlier camp systems. (13:27–13:51)
  • Forgetting the pre-extermination function of Nazi camps blinds societies to warning signs and incremental cruelties. (14:05–15:14)

• Process, Not Threshold:

  • Focus should be on how and why people are detained, not just on outcome or scale:

    "The key thing to look at is less the starting conditions...than how individuals arrive there." – Andrea Pitzer (16:51)

    • Arbitrary detention, lack of trial, identity-based targeting—all hallmarks of concentration camps at any stage.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Dangers of Narrowing the Term (Andrea Pitzer):

  "If we can't use the name for these camps that ties them to their historical forebears... we cut off one key path to understanding what happened." (22:23)

• Frank Abe’s Historical Reflection:

  "I'm a third generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one." (21:16)

• On the Uniqueness of the Holocaust and Wider Responsibility (Andrea Pitzer):

  "Rooted in the undeniable uniqueness of the Holocaust… But the Minnesota Bookseller's view is also very much held by many Jewish and non-Jewish Americans." (06:19)

• Warning from the Past (Frank Abe):

  "History isn't what happens to us. History is what we make happen." (22:54)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:25 – Pitzer on public discomfort and consequences of the term “concentration camp”
• 02:05 – Jamie Schweiz Nettle details current U.S. facilities, directly invoking the term
• 04:40 – Jake Tapper articulates mainstream objections to contemporary use of the term
• 05:16 – Jewish community representative: importance of a broader historical perspective
• 09:27–10:19 – Early historical debates over what constitutes a concentration camp
• 11:35 – Nazi adoption and adaptation of camp models from other nations
• 15:24–16:44 – Current U.S. detention center conditions and accounts from former detainees
• 21:16 – Frank Abe’s statement as a Japanese-American internment survivor’s descendant
• 22:23 – Dangers of cutting off historical connection by avoiding the term

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Takeaways

• Refusing to use "concentration camp" for modern detention centers dangerously narrows public understanding and historical memory.
• There is a critical need to recognize how stepwise erosion of rights, arbitrary detention, and identity-based targeting universally define concentration camps—long before extermination begins.
• Using accurate historical terminology is an act of vigilance and resistance, not disrespect to the past, but a tool to prevent future atrocities.

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The episode offers a clarion call to recognize, name, and act on historical patterns—emphasizing the power and responsibility of language in defending democracy and human rights.

Transcript

[Jake Tapper]

I'm not a big fan of people using the term concentration camp to describe detention camps. That has a very specific meaning.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Today's episode is based on a recent post for my newsletter, Degenerate Art. Several people mentioned that it had been useful to them.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

I understand that.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And so it seemed like a good idea to do a podcast episode on it as well.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

I don't need to argue with you about it.

[Jake Tapper]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I'm going to focus on 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.

[Frank Abe]

Even those who do learn from history sometimes seem destined to repeat it. Andrea Pitzer, our guest and today's speaker, understands this perhaps more acutely than most of us.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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. Tonight she's presenting her new book, One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps. Why look at this issue now? History is full of moments in which hindsight provides the only clear view. This is not one of them. I watched a video from January in which a bookstore owner in Minneapolis was interviewed by Jake Tapper on cnn.

[Jake Tapper]

One of those businesses participating is an independent bookstore in Minneapolis called Moon Palace Books, and the co owner, Jamie Schweiz Nettle, joins me now.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Asked about the planned walkouts and shutdowns that day, the bookstore owner dove right into the crisis.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

Well, Jake, we can't do business as usual right now anyway because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours to send them to concentration camps.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The bookstore owner talks about other businesses whose staff or customers are afraid to be out on the street.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

So we're closing in solidarity to help send a message.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And then Tapper jumps in.

[Jake Tapper]

Just one note. I'm not gonna. I'm not here to defend ice, but I'm not a big fan of people using the term concentration camp to describe detention camps. That has a very specific meaning in terms of.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But the bookstore owner doesn't wait for him to finish. He interrupts.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

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. Not saying they're Dachau, I'm not saying they're putting people in ovens yet, but these are concentration camps.

[Andrea Pitzer]

After watching that video last month, I posted on Blue sky that I wish I could talk to Jake Tapper. On CNN about this history that is of course unlikely to happen.

[Jake Tapper]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Andrea Pitzer]

He doesn't seem inclined to think through this fraught question in a serious way on air. Okay, I, I and there's no human connection between us that might lead him to talk to me.

[Jake Tapper]

Good luck to you and your family and your city.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it 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 somebody who knows the history well.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

In one of her latest articles, Pitzer writes qu While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And even in our era of shattered journalism, a survey for the American Jewish

[Frank Abe]

Committee found that only 26% of those

[Andrea Pitzer]

questions could correctly answer four questions about

[Frank Abe]

the magnitude of the Holocaust and and its origins.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Television still reaches so many people.

[Frank Abe]

Only 53% of those over 18 could correctly answer that about 6 million Jews were killed.

[Andrea Pitzer]

For those who think that Jake Tapper simply doesn't know or understand concentration camp

[Jake Tapper]

history at all, last night you tweeted, quote, last week we called the concentration camps at the border for what they are.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I can't speak to the profundity of his awareness.

[Jake Tapper]

In the week since the acting Director of Customs and Border Patrol resigned, Bank of America announced they will stop financing for profit, immigration, detention, and private prisons.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it's clear he's familiar with parts of the larger story.

[Jake Tapper]

Words matter, unquote.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In the summer of 2019, I talked to Esquire's Jack Holmes about events underway at the border during Trump's first administration and how they related to concentration camp history.

[Jake Tapper]

I guess two questions here.

[Andrea Pitzer]

That Esquire piece was cited by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on social media to frame her use of the term concentration camp for what was happening at the border.

[Jake Tapper]

One, you're taking credit for calling these camps detention centers. You're taking credit for those developments by using the term concentration camp.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A week later on CNN with Ocasio Cortez, he laid out his problem with using the term to apply to contemporary immigrant detention.

[Jake Tapper]

To what do you say to Americans, 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. You're hurting our feelings, hurting our emotions, hurting our memories.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Jake Tapper]

What do you say to those Holocaust survivors?

[Andrea Pitzer]

And he might very well be.

[Jewish Community Representative]

Our Jewish community has kind of has rallied around this issue because when we talk about concentration camps, if we do not also talk about Japanese internment, if we don't talk about the Boer War, if we don't talk about the many times that this has happened in the history of humanity, then we also erase the suffering of those people.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Yet I would argue that in this case, as a journalist, as someone who understands that concentration camps were the forerunners of extermination camps, as someone with a national audience, he has a higher burden to share that knowledge with others.

[Jewish Community Representative]

We have also made sure that we explicitly use the term concentration camp rather

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Jewish Community Representative]

And we have to learn from the slow process, the slow dehumanizing process that leads to horrible things happening to people

[Andrea Pitzer]

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 Minnesota Booksellers view is also very much held by many Jewish and non Jewish Americans. Rabbis, Jewish studies programs, Holocaust memorial education foundations and Holocaust museums alike have brought me in to talk about concentration camp history and how it fits in with what's happening in the US Now. In these discussions, I often begin by tracking the half century between the earliest modern concentration camps and Birkenau, the extermination camp added to the existing concentration camp complex at Auschwitz. I try to help people understand how humanity descended to such modern atrocities in the decades after the invention of barbed wire and automatic weapons. So when you can pin people in where they can't just hop a fence and get out and you have weapons to hold them.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

And some camps it was more important

[Andrea Pitzer]

to have the barbed wire. Some camps it was more important to have the automatic weapons. And I hope my words are useful, but many times they're hardly necessary for others to recognize events in the US today as repeating some grim history.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

The Jewish populations in Germany are targeted legally. It becomes legally very hard to exist as a Jewish person in Germany, but In terms of who's the camps are focused on in this moment, that's not who they're focused on initially. And what the Germans want in this moment is they want the Jews to leave.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A month ago, just a few miles away from my home, Jews Against ICE marchers demonstrated in front of ICE headquarters, some holding signs that read Never Again is now.

[Frank Abe]

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

[Andrea Pitzer]

USA Today reported that Beth Rubin, age 67, drove six hours to join the demonstration because of the parallels to her own family's trauma in the 1930s. The messenger has delivered a message. What is our role? 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. We must become the messengers, messengers in such a fraught moment. With detention camps already in existence, with planned warehouse style expansions to come since President Trump took office, the number of non criminal detainees arrested by ICE has increased by over 2000%. I think looking at this question through a historic lens is useful.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

We need to keep in mind how do you get from regular democracy and regular life into something like the death camps?

[Andrea Pitzer]

The 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.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

The truth is, it takes several years of propaganda, of manipulation of the public, of bending the courts, of weakening legislatures. It's those warning signs and those preemptive things we should be thinking about rather than just that Auschwitz becomes then some island of isolation that came out of nowhere, because that's not how it happened.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In fact, the question was asked from almost the first moment it was possible to compare one set of camps to the next. Before Nazi extermination factories rose in Europe, before the first prisoner entered the Soviet Gulag, before the 20th century had even begun, concentration camps found their first home in the cities and towns of Cuba just a few years later, during the Second Boer War in southern Africa, several newspapers compared the new British system of camps 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 they approved of those similarities. Others denied the new camps were concentration camps at all. Echoing today's arguments.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

I think we need to reclaim this term concentration camp for this kind of irregular detention of civilians without trial.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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. Than to apply the term refugee to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

And Hitler is very aware of concentration camp history. In his own writings, long before the

[Andrea Pitzer]

Nazis rose to power, Hitler made multiple direct references to prior camp systems.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

He himself is aware of this history and is sort of actively seizing that in this argument.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Along with later imaginative leaps incorporating visions of Native American forced relocation and removal, which of course led to genocide as well. Hitler spoke before an audience of 2,000 at the Munchner Kindy 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. Hitler used the Boer camps as an excuse. 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.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

What's really formative for him and the camps of World War I, of course, he's quite aware of those, but he's also talking about the Native American reservations. And he sees. He actually frames this in terms of US Western expansion, their eastward expansion, in the same way.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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 kind of concentration camps that already existed in the world. They were literally on six continents. Those were the Nazi models. It was only malice, impunity, and time that turned them into what they became.

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

If regular concentration camps are atomic weapons, then, you know, the Nazi camps become the hydrogen bomb, this thing that could not have been imagined.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

Foreign.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Says that other camps may technically qualify as concentration camps on some academic level, but that when most Americans hear the term, they think only about death camps.

[Jake Tapper]

You take my point, right?

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Jake Tapper]

You retweeted a story from Esquire magazine discussing all this, talking about the academic definition versus the definition that most people think of, the colloquial definition that doesn't mean the concentration camp or just a concentration of individuals, but a Nazi death camp.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And it puts him in a bind that I've never seen him acknowledge, one that's difficult to finesse.

[Jake Tapper]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Pollster/Researcher]

There's a poll in late 1944 and the question is asked, do you believe that Germans are murdering Jews in concentration camps? It runs in the Washington Post. 76% of Americans by that time believe that it's happening. But then they're asked the numbers. How many Jews do you think have been killed?

[Andrea Pitzer]

It took many years before the extent of the horror that had happened there was clearly laid out.

[Pollster/Researcher]

Americans cannot grasp the scale and the scope of the crime. It's only one in five Americans believe that it's more than a million Jews who have been murdered and by that point it's more than 5 million.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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 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.

[Jake Tapper]

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were brought here on cattle cars like these. They were given no food, no real bathroom. And when they arrived, families were torn apart.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They existed for years as the cruelties inside them expanded, providing the bureaucratic systems, personnel and tactics that led to the Holocaust.

[Jake Tapper]

Some were chosen for work, but most were murdered.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Journalist/Reporter]

The Associated Press obtained 13911 calls involving the nation's largest immigration detention facility set up at Fort Bliss Army Base in Texas.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They were also very similar to the camps that the US is currently filling and building.

[Journalist/Reporter]

Along with interviews and court records, they offer a disturbing portrait of overcrowding, medical neglect, malnutrition and emotional distress.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Seamus Culleton, an Irishman detained for months in Camp East Montana in Texas.

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

I've been locked in the same room now for four and a half months. I've had barely any outside time. No fresh air, no sunshine, described violence

[Andrea Pitzer]

and a lack of food, calling the

[Jamie Schweiz Nettle]

facility Modern day concentration camp. It's a bunch of temporary tents. There's probably room for a thousand detainees in each tent. I believe there's like five tents.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Several deaths have taken place there so far.

[Journalist/Reporter]

Owen Roman Ramsing spent nearly five months at Camp East Montana.

[Andrea Pitzer]

One already ruled a homicide, and the ACLU has reported sexual assaults and beatings.

[Former Detainee]

Every day felt like a week. Every week felt like a month. Every month felt like a year.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The conditions of camp detention will always worsen over the long haul. And the conditions in US Camps are already terrifying.

[Former Detainee]

You know, the torture just, you know, the lack of sleep, the lack of food. Inhumane is my main word.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But the key thing to look at is less the starting conditions in them than how individuals arrive there. This lady, one of the many parents

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

trying to drop off a child this

[Andrea Pitzer]

morning at the Raito de Sal daycare along Addison, met instead with the sound of screaming as a young teacher was

[Unidentified Historian/Expert]

dragged out of the building by armed

[Andrea Pitzer]

camel clad and masked men. If you were swept off the streets in vans by secret police wearing masks, I want to bring in California based attorney James Cook, who works alongside renowned civil rights attorney John Burris. His firm is known for taking on high profile civil rights cases, many involving police misconduct. If your initiation into detention involved transit camps meant to hide your departure and effectively disappear you from legal help temporarily or forever.

[James Cook]

So here's what's happening. There's. There's a lot of people are being swept up. That's first of all. And they're bought to this building at Fort Snelling, which is the Whipple Building. Right.

[Andrea Pitzer]

If you are held with others who are denied due process, I try to

[James Cook]

get the person out first. I. I try to determine whether or not they're inside the building. And then I also try to file something to slow down the process.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And if you are detained with people who have predominantly been rounded up more on the basis of ethnicity, race or religion or political affiliation than for any criminal charge you have in common.

[James Cook]

This is like my fourth time that this has happened. I've come here to try to find out their status. And I tell them, hey, I've been hired by whomever to be their attorney. They say, okay, we'll take the name. They've come back out and told me that the specific person does not want to see me.

[Andrea Pitzer]

You're in a concentration camp.

[James Cook]

If you get an attorney and somebody comes to see you, you definitely want to see him. So what I suspect is that they're not telling the full story.

[Andrea Pitzer]

It is only a question of what stage concentration camp you're in and whether you will be stuck there until the camp is allowed to transform into its next nightmare form.

[Journalist/Reporter]

During his time at Camp East Montana, a Cuban man died in early January of asphyxia after he was restrained following what Ice said was a suicide attempt.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Concentration camps are a process, one that can be interrupted at the beginning of the but less easily further along, and often only at dreadful cost.

[Journalist/Reporter]

Ramsing says he overheard a guard say that there was a $500 bet over whether the next suicide would occur by a certain date.

[Andrea Pitzer]

That's why this conversation matters.

[Former Detainee]

And then I turned around and said, what the. Like basically, you know, you're betting against me. Like, basically like committing suicide.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So if Jake Tapper wants to say that death camp is the standard that must be met for something to be called a concentration 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 Taffer 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.

[Frank Abe]

I'm Frank Abe. I'm a writer and filmmaker in Seattle.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Another problem comes up.

[Frank Abe]

I helped spark the popular campaign in 1978 to get America to apologize for putting us into concentration camps in World War II and to make reparation for it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I suppose it's possible to argue that the detainees in pre1942 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.

[Frank Abe]

The Trump administration's plan now underway to spend $38 billion to buy or lease existing warehouses across the country. This money would create a system of mega detention centers capable of holding seven to 10,000 people each.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Yet those early Nazi camps had much in common with prior camps outside Germany.

[Frank Abe]

10,000. That's the size of a Manzanar or

[Andrea Pitzer]

Tuli Lily, as well as camps we have here in the U.S. now, I'm

[Frank Abe]

a third generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And foreign prison camps to which we have rendered detainees in 1942, the US

[Frank Abe]

government forcibly removed 125,000Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes, 2/3 of them American citizens, all sent to remote camps and high deserts and swamps behind barbed wire with armed guards and held there for years.

[Andrea Pitzer]

At what point in the course of history did camps like Dachau become concentration camps in Tapper's mind?

[Frank Abe]

My father was one of them, imprisoned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. My stepfather was held at Tule Lake on the California, Oregon border.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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?

[Frank Abe]

Was there any due process as guaranteed in the Constitution? No charges, no trials, no fair hearings?

[Andrea Pitzer]

Or was it only after the fact, a kind of retroactive symbolic naming after the horrific threshold of extermination camps was

[Frank Abe]

crossed, just as there is none today for people being kidnapped off the streets.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Frank Abe]

These warehouses, by any objective means, are nothing but 21st century American concentration camps.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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.

[Frank Abe]

None of this is inevitable. History isn't what happens to us. History is what we make happen.

[Andrea Pitzer]

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 are 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 of 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? And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid [e-mail] and consider giving next comes what? A five star review you where you get your podcasts.