The First Concentration Camp
Putting the state's enemies beyond the law
One of the top priorities of the Nazi regime in the early months after the seizure of power in 1933 was bringing some order to the unofficial network of prison camps and torture chambers that had been run by the party’s stormtroopers. Over the next 12 years the Nazis would construct a sprawling system of camps and sub-camps that stretched across occupied Europe. But in the beginning they focused their efforts on one camp in the small Bavarian town of Dachau; SS director Heinrich Himmler appointed an ex-policeman named Theodor Eicke as commandant of the camp. Eicke quickly set about establishing a brutal modus operandi that would become the blueprint for the concentration camp system. Most concentration camps were not death camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, where all of the people arriving at the camp were murdered within hours, day after day. Even at Auschwitz, a place synonymous with hell in the popular imagination, a few inmates were culled out from the doomed arrivals and put to work. The first class of prisoners in the camps were the Nazis’ political enemies, mainly Social Democrats and German communists. Later, as the Nazis attempted to socially and racially re-engineer German society, the camps would house people they considered undesirable: prostitutes, gay men, the “work-shy”, alcoholics, the “racially degenerate”, and the homeless. As the historian Timothy Snyder notes in his writings, the Nazis’ innovation was to place the entire concentration camp system, and its inmates, beyond the reach of the state. The camps were administered by the SS, which was a party organization, not an official government entity. Inmates were frequently sentenced to terms of indefinite length, and their sentences could be extended for any number of minor infractions. Discipline was savage (featuring beatings, whippings, and canings) and inmates often spent the days performing backbreaking labor outside the camp. At the end of 1934 the concentration camp division of the SS was given a special title: the Totenkopf, or death’s head division. Historian Richard Evans notes that by 1936 “the concentration camps had become institutions beyond the law…however the regime made no secret at all of the basic fact of their existence…What happened in the camps was a nameless horror that was all the more potent because its reality could only be guessed at from the broken bodies and spirits of the inmates when they were released.”
On January 29th President Trump ordered the creation of a detention camp for migrants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The president claimed without offering any evidence that “Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.” (Are these guys like the Legion of Doom ?) The camp will be across the bay from Camp 5, a site with its own problematic history. Camp 5 contains a little over a dozen terrorism suspects, including at least one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks. However the suspects have never been tried, due both to their murky legal status as unlawful enemy combatants and the likelihood that several of them could produce credible evidence that they were tortured while in U.S. custody. The New York Times reports that “it is unclear whether the government has legal authority to transfer migrants from the United States to Guantanamo, which is an odd and ambiguous place for legal purposes.” As a practical matter, migrants currently in detention are being held without any access to communications, so they have no legal representation. Trump suggested that as many as 30,000 migrants will be kept in Guantanamo indefinitely.
While I’m not claiming Trump is in the process of setting up a Caribbean Dachau, I do believe that Guantanamo’s “odd and ambiguous” legal status is the main reason for going to the trouble and expense of establishing a camp there. Trump is taking a population he has demonized for years- migrants- and is concentrating some of its members in a location which effectively lies beyond the law. They could have remained in facilities here in the U.S. just as easily- more easily, in fact. The symbolism is obvious: migrants are just as dangerous as Al-Qa’eda terrorists. Exactly which government agency will guard, feed, and provide medical care to these inmates remains unclear. It seems to me to be a recipe for potential disaster; the government is going to detain perhaps 30,000 men from various countries in a tent city surrounded by barbed wire on a small island with little or nothing to do for (as far as they know) the rest of their lives, since after all they are supposedly too dangerous to repatriate. At the same time it’s curious that men who are allegedly such a menace to society haven’t already committed some grave offense that landed them a long stretch in a U.S. prison.
Consistent with his desire to employ the U.S. military against people he considers “the enemy within,” Trump also announced plans to house tens of thousands of migrants at U.S. military bases, pulling the uniformed services ever deeper into the arena of law enforcement, where they are forbidden by law from playing a role except in rare instances. Not only will such operations take away resources from the military’s warfighting mission, it will also damage morale and hurt retention (most people don’t enlist in the military to be a prison guard). Forcing the military into this role will create situations which are ripe for abuse like that which occurred in Abu Ghurayb prison in the aftermath of the Iraq war- not because American soldiers are sadistic brutes, but because like at Abu Ghurayb they are likely to be thrust into stressful, even dehumanizing environments for which they were not trained and were not provided sufficient numbers of personnel.
It’s worth noting that the measures Trump is announcing with such fanfare will do almost nothing to accomplish his stated goal of deporting the nation’s approximately 11 million illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and gainfully employed. (The failures of successive administrations of both parties to address this reality are a topic for another day.) However it does create the impression of substantive action; perhaps that is enough to satisfy the president’s supporters, who have often mistaken theater for achievement. They may even prefer it. In his campaign last year Trump was also explicit that the “enemy within” was not limited to migrants but extended to a whole host of other undesirables, including transgender Americans, Democrats, and members of the media. It may not be long before Trump begins “joking” about placing others of his enemies beyond the reach of the law. Those who are tempted to scoff at that idea might want to contemplate how many of the guardrails the president has barreled through in just four weeks.