Conclusion

In 1949, American critic Isaac Rosenfeld published an article in Partisan Review, entitled ‘The Meaning of Terror'. In this cry of despair, Rosenfeld set out his opinion that the world had been forever sullied:

Terror is today the main reality, because it is the model reality.

What Rosenfeld captured was the way in which the concentration camp became an expression of modern states, especially fascist states, at a certain historical moment. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote that: ‘This reality of concentration camps, this circular movement of torturers and tortures, this loss of humanity threatens human survival in the future. Confronted with the reality of the concentration camps, we are unable to speak. This is a greater danger than the atom bomb, since it represents a threat to the human soul.’^[720] That may be true but it is also ahistorical. Concentration camps emerged in the early twentieth century as modern states emerged out of older empires, sustained by ideas of nationalism and biological metaphors defining the healthy and valuable on the one hand and the polluting and degenerate on the other.

It is in fact possible to historicise the emergence of the concentration camp and to explain why, for all the continuities with social and colonial practices of preceding centuries, the term and the phenomenon arose when they did.

The concentration camps symbolized the transformation and radicalization of the politics of occupation, which extended from the treatment of political prisoners and prisoners of war to the deportation of civilians, from forced labour in extreme conditions to the hunger and misery occupied peoples were also subjected to. Concentration camps also came to serve as a space for social cleansing and internal politics.^[721]

Concentration camps were ways of keeping the unwanted elements at bay and, furthermore, putting them to use: not only through their labour (which was rarely very productive) but as a warning to wider society too. ‘The camp', Richard Overy writes, ‘reflected political and social insecurities, and a public discourse of fear, part real, part sustained by regimes built on warring ideologies.'^[722] The concentration camp was an expression of the centralisation of terror, one of the key characteristics of the modern state in the age of nationalism and technology.

For many historians today, the extraordinary vileness of the Nazi camps means that it is invalid to use the term ‘concentration camps' to encompass both the Nazi sites and those established by regimes in other times and places. Yet many of the first people to see the Nazi camps in 1945 made the connection explicitly, as a way of warning the world of the risk of seeing the Third Reich as a sui generis case.

And even in this year of peace and victory, we have let the concentration camp live on. We have let it live in Argentina, right in our own hemisphere. We have let it live in Egypt, where Greek soldiers who a year and a half ago revolted against a government-in-exile which had oppressed them while it held the power were clapped in prison by our British allies. We are letting it live in country after country - in Greece and in Palestine, in India and in Spain, among nations liberated and unliberated from the oppressions against which, after four long years, we were finally forced to fight. We wrote ‘Four Freedoms' on our banners - freedoms for which men were dying in places we had never heard of; but now the freedoms and the places and the Buchenwalds have all receded into the unpleasant past... Our measure of responsibility for Buchenwald is not so great or immediate as is Germany's, but it is equal with Germany's responsi­bility for concentration camps as a creation of mankind. If we deny that responsibility today, as Germany did when Hitler came to power, we may find Buchenwald in our own land tomorrow.^[723]

This kind of universalising moralising is not to everyone's taste. Some may find Knauth's argument that all people are to some extent responsible for things done by a certain regime unpalatable, regarding it as playing down the specific responsibility of those who created and ran the camps. Yet there are different ways we can read Knauth. He could be warning us not to regard the Nazi camps as the only manifestation of concentration camps in history. He may be reminding us that even if they are not as destructive or as synon­ymous with a ruling ideology as the Nazi camps, concentration camps can still exist elsewhere. And he might be telling us that bracketing off the Nazi experience - even if done for valid and justifiable reasons - might have the opposite effect to the one intended and might allow evil to flourish. Indeed, it is quite clear that the camps discussed in this chapter are all quite different. I have stressed the camps of World War I not because they were physically more like the Nazi camps than were others but because they help us to understand the ways in which camps became indispensable tools of the twentieth-century state. That it is nevertheless possible to speak of them using the same designation - concentration camps - does not mean that they are the same either empirically or morally. The question is how we historicise the camps.