The Bedeviling Term "Concentration Camp"

NPR's ombudsman steps into the lingering controversy over whether it is correct and appropriate to refer to the camps where Japanese Americans were confined as "concentration camps."

I think they get it exactly right at the very end:

What we all really seem to be seeking is a phrase that doesn't diminish the cruelty of uprooting and isolating Japanese and Japanese-Americans against their will, but also doesn't diminish the true horror of Nazi extermination camps.

I once attended a talk by one of the leading Japanese American advocates for making "concentration camp" the community's so-to-speak "official" or endorsed term.  She urged the audience to embrace the term in part for its shock value -- the way it hits you right in the gut.

That troubled me greatly.  To the extent that the term "concentration camp" hits us in the gut today, it's because of Auschwitz-Birkenau, not because of Heart Mountain or the British camps for the Boers.  

At that moment I decided that I would no longer use the term "concentration camp" in settings where I couldn't immediately stress that the term was historically authentic but not a comparison to the Nazi camps.

Comments

[Alfred Brophy]

As I recall -- it's been a number of years since I worked on this -- the Tulsa newspapers used the term concentration camp to describe the places where Greenwood residents were detained after the 1921 riot there.

[John Kang]

I remember reading in a book written by Michael Rogin, my college prof, that the term "concentration camp" was used by FDR to refer to the Japanese American camps. So I looked it up and found it: page 55 of MR's Ronald Reagan, The Movie (the weirdest and coolest book on politics that I've ever read, if I may add).

If Rogin was right, his account wouldn't settle, of course, the moral issue of whether to use the term in contemporary parlance for the JA camps, but there would be a historical basis for doing so.

[Kevin Jon Heller]

Eric,

I'm curious, what's wrong with the traditional distinction for Nazi camps between "concentration camps" and "death camps" (or "extermination camps")? That distinction allows us to include Japanese internment camps in the former without blurring the lines between them and (most of) the Nazi camps.

[Eric Muller]

This is a very useful question, and it gets to the heart of the issue. "Most of" the German camps were not in fact "extermination camps" or "death camps." A relative handful of them were "death camps": Sobibor, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Treblinka. Most of the German camps (Dachau, Ebensee, Mauthausen, Westerbork, Gurs, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and on and on and on) were either ghettos where people were warehoused or various kinds of slave labor camps. And none of them -- not a one -- can meaningfully be compared (in their living conditions, or in the policies of the governing authorities toward the inmates) to the camps run by the War Relocation Authority in the United States.

[Jason Mazzone]

This was an issue also at the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case. Justice Roberts in his dissent referred to the case as involving "convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp." This prompted Black to write in his majority opinion: "[W]e deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies."

[Harwell Wells]

I think the term "concentration camp" had different meanings pre- and post-45. The OED online says that the term was first used in the Boer War, to describe the camps that the British forced Boer families into. From what little I can remember, the camps were appalling, but not really comparable to the WW2 death camps. I would think that older use explains why FDR and Roberts used the term.

[A Coot]

This is a good example of History hijacking a term. "Concentration camp" was, I believe, first used to describe the camps set up by the British during the Boer War. It simply meant a camp in which civilians were gathered or concentrated. The Brits did this to deny the Boer Commandos logistical support from the sympathetic population.

[Bill Turnier]

Although the term concentration camp may have made its debut in the Boer War, we did the same thing as the Brits then did in Vietnam and called then "Strategic Hamlets." Oh, what a little wordsmithing can do.