**Konzentrationslager** were Nazi camps where, initially,
political opponents, social undesirables and sexual “deviants”
were placed by the regime. Later this was expanded to include Jews,
Slavs and other enemies of the regime. They were characterised by
overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, lack of regard for the well
being of the inhabitants, lack of legal representation, uncertainty
regarding possibility of release.
In this, the camps followed the principles established by the
British in the Boer War. The **Todeslager** and
**Vernichtungslager** (Death- & Extermination-Camps) didn’t
exist until 1942.
Their purpose was genocide.
Dachau was a _Concentration Camp_, as was Auschwitz I.
Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was an _Extermination Camp_.
For various reasons, all the various -lagers were monikered as
“Concentration Camp” by the Western media. There were many more
variants of the camps in the Nazi-state apparatus, slave-camps
like von Braun’s Peenemunde, Labour Camps like IG Farben’s
Auschwitz-Monowitz.
What the USA has created on its southern border absolutely meets
the definition of _“konzentrationslager”_, just as the WRA
Japanese-internment camps did during WW2.
This isn’t hard, and it isn’t complicated.
If your defence of Trump’s Concentration Camps is that they
aren’t gassing people, therefore they aren’t a concentration
camp; then you are exhibiting profound ignorance of the meaning of
the word, and you are defending or minimising the horrors of the
Nazis’ _Konzentrationslager_ system.
> “No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the
> world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and
> disgraces of its past. […] The internment of Americans of
> Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be
> repeated.”
That wasn’t some soy-drinking appeasing liberal said that, that
was George H.W. Bush, in December 1991.
The present regime in the United States has chosen, deliberately
and with intent, to ignore those words.
People who ignore those words are not fit to hold office.
