Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

CONCENTRATION CAMPS, SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
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Nazis exploited the labor of their prisoners, often working them to death in conditions of
utmost privation. In many of the camps, a separate compound for women was also built.
In one case, an entire camp, Ravensbrück, exclusively housed women until almost the
very end of the Third Reich.
Significantly, the concentration camp system underwent huge transformations over the
twelve-year course of the Third Reich (1933–1945), until the camps were liberated by
British, U.S., Canadian, and Soviet forces during 1944 and 1945. Literally millions had
been incarcerated in the concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands (at least) had
lost their lives at Nazi hands.
The image of the Nazi concentration camps has been confused in the popular consciousness
by reference to the so-called Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps, created
for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (Die Endlösung des Judenfrage): Auschwitz-
Birkenau, Lublin-Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno. It should be
remembered, however, that the last four of these camps were not, strictly speaking, concentration
camps in the accepted sense of the term, as they were not intended to house
large numbers of people for any length of time: their sole purpose was factorylike annihilation,
in which millions were murdered.
Concentration Camps, South African War. In October 1899 the British Empire found
itself at war with the two Afrikaner republics of southern Africa, the South African
Republic and the Orange Free State, known collectively as the Boer Republics. In December
1900 a strategy to win the war was introduced by the British military authorities. Henceforth,
enemy sources of supply would be targeted along with the Boer forces themselves. As
by this stage Boer towns had been captured, the only remaining foci of operations were Boer
farmhouses and estates, which were often used as bases for the Boer guerrilla units. Responding
to this situation, British Commander in Chief Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener
(1850–1916) ordered that Boer farms be destroyed and their inhabitants—for the most
part women and children, owing to the fact that most men were then fighting in the
field—be herded together and interned in what were termed “concentration camps.”
These camps were an unmitigated humanitarian disaster from the first. Unsuitable locations,
huge overcrowding, a thorough inadequacy of sanitary conditions and medical personnel,
and unsatisfactory supply and poor quality of foodstuffs were just a few of the problems.
These institutions were an amalgam of refugee and internment camps, but in concentrating
together families from widely distant farms and towns they brought people into close
contact who were often devoid of the necessary immunities from disease that urban living
can promote. The upshot saw an unprecedented death rate. By the end of October
1901, it had risen to an average of 344 per 1,000 inmates across forty-six camps, though
in some locations, at certain periods, it was nearly twice that number. At its height, the
camp network confined 117,000 Boer women and children, but, by war’s end in 1902,
some 27,000, mostly children, had died. Protests about this state of affairs were noisy in
Britain and elsewhere, and efforts were made late in the war to alleviate the situation. The
legacy of bitterness the camps created, however, lasts to this day, with some extremist
Afrikaners (Boerevolk) claiming that the British actions were genocidal in that a projection
of up to 3 million Afrikaners were not born in the century following the end of the
South African War because of the population losses incurred by the concentration camps.
It is also claimed that this was a deliberate policy on the part of the British government
in order to depopulate the Afrikaner areas of South Africa and replace them with English