What year were concentration camps introduced?

Answer 1

The words "concentration camps" are susceptible to a variety of connotations, however, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says, "The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy."

In Germany, it was in 1933 that newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler started the camps. Political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and subversives initially filled the camps, with the population of Jews eventually far exceeding all other groups.

Those camps would grow in number, and morph in purpose, until they became more death factories the concentration camps. Showers designed for poison gases, giant crematoriums, railways going straight into the camps. While it is customary to regard them as "horrific", when one actually reads about it, you are at some point struck by just how horrific.

Frankly, while all nations have had their share of evil, the death factories/concentration camps of the Germans are something of a qualitatively different level. A factory specifically for sorting out millions of families, with lines for different genders and ages, and the final eerie touch of assembly lines set up to make sure that what paltry value could be had from the victim's clothes, luggage and even teeth, could be extracted - and used to finance the very machine that took it.

A kind of perpetual motion of death with the very people killed being used to fund more killing. Nuremburg could only assign death. No human court could deliver the punishment earned by the planners of that.

In the United States, it was in November of 1917 that German Americans were required to register. This was overseen by the Enemy Alien Registration section of the U.S. Justice Department. 10,000 German American men and women were detained. There were released in 1919.

Camps were re-established in 1941, during World War II, for Japanese Americans, then German and Italian residents, then German Americans and Italian Americans, then the importation of various Germans and Italians from Central and South America. Including 81 German Jews who had ironically fled Germany to avoid their camps.

A good choice nonetheless, as detainees at American camps typically only suffered complete loss of property, job, homes, separation from spouse and child (sometimes), weather extremes, primitive accomodations, and years out of their lives. They weren't specifically targeted for murder like in the German camps.