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> whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death Those are called death camps. A concentration or internment camp is where you stick people who you don't t

> whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death Those are called death camps. A concentration or internment camp is where you stick people who you don't trust, so you can keep an eye on them. Prisons are essentially a form of concentration camp, but the key distinction is that you have to be found guilty of something to end up in prison. It's probably more accurate to think of a concentration camp as a long term jail.

tomp 7y ago
> > whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death > Those are called death camps. I try to not engage in political discussions, but I'm going to strongly disagree with you. The popular definition (i.e. actual living language) of a "concentration camp" is "where people are killed" - for example, see Wikipedia page Auschwitz concentration camp.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I get that this is a sensitive topic and understand the association, but the first sentence on Wikipedia's Auschwitz page says, "The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps" The first section of the "Nazi concentration camps" wikipedia page ends with, "Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews in the ghettos by way of gas chambers." Google gives the OED definition, "a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz." While colloquially a lot of these terms are conflated, the literature seems to make a clear distinction.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  I see where you're coming from. The problem is that German death camps are by far the most talked about type of concentration camp. Canadians and Americans had concentration camps for the Japanese, for example, where the conditions were significantly better. Even most of the German concentration camps were relatively humane. One pattern I've seen, is that some people use "concentration camps" to refer to bad ones, and "internment camps" to refer to okay ones, and maybe that's a an okay distinction, but the reality is often a lot less black and white than our words would like to suggest.

tomp 7y ago

> > whereas Jews were rounded up and starved to death > Those are called death camps. I try to not engage in political discussions, but I'm going to strongly disagree with you. The popular definition (i.e. actual living language) of a "concentration camp" is "where people are killed" - for example, see Wikipedia page Auschwitz concentration camp.

pfranz 7y ago
I get that this is a sensitive topic and understand the association, but the first sentence on Wikipedia's Auschwitz page says, "The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps" The first section of the "Nazi concentration camps" wikipedia page ends with, "Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews in the ghettos by way of gas chambers." Google gives the OED definition, "a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz." While colloquially a lot of these terms are conflated, the literature seems to make a clear distinction.
frenchyatwork 7y ago
I see where you're coming from. The problem is that German death camps are by far the most talked about type of concentration camp. Canadians and Americans had concentration camps for the Japanese, for example, where the conditions were significantly better. Even most of the German concentration camps were relatively humane. One pattern I've seen, is that some people use "concentration camps" to refer to bad ones, and "internment camps" to refer to okay ones, and maybe that's a an okay distinction, but the reality is often a lot less black and white than our words would like to suggest.