Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Welcome to this week's program, where we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about one of the most challenging and
Speaker 1: controversial topics that I can think of, namely concentration camps.
Speaker 1: The phrase alone is enough to strike terror in your heart,
Speaker 1: and controversially, this phrase, so closely associated with Nazi Germany
Speaker 1: and with the Holocaust, has been used by some critics
Speaker 1: to refer to the current migrant detention facilities that the
Speaker 1: United States government is using to detain people at our
Speaker 1: southern border. To discuss the history and the politics, I'm
Speaker 1: very pleased to be joined today by Andrea Pitzer. Andrea
Speaker 1: is a journalist who loves to unearth lost history, and
Speaker 1: for our purposes today, the lost history that she's uncovered
Speaker 1: is that of the concentration camp itself. Her book, One
Speaker 1: Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps is a
Speaker 1: deep dive into the term concentration camp, where it came from,
Speaker 1: and where it's going today. And she's also been an
Speaker 1: outspoken critic of the Trump administration's to tension policy. Andrea
Speaker 1: I want to start just by telling you my own
Speaker 1: story of how I came to expand on the uses
Speaker 1: of the term. I'm Jewish. Like a lot of Jews,
Speaker 1: I grew up hearing the phrase concentration camps and never
Speaker 1: distinguishing it from death camps or anything else that the
Speaker 1: Nazis may have done. And like a lot of people,
Speaker 1: I had teachers who had camp tattoos on their arms,
Speaker 1: and they and others used the term concentration camps in
Speaker 1: a kind of generic way. And then I realized that
Speaker 1: it was a term that originally had something to do
Speaker 1: with a concentration of people, and that got me looking
Speaker 1: into the history a little bit. And then when your
Speaker 1: book came out, I thought, this is so great. Someone's
Speaker 1: actually doing this in a systematic way. So I guess
Speaker 1: I want to start by asking, is it the case
Speaker 1: that the first use in the English language, at least
Speaker 1: of concentration camps dates to the Bore War, the rebellion
Speaker 1: against British authority in South Africa. Well, strangely enough, the
Speaker 1: phrase itself goes back to at least the middle of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, at least in the British press, and
Speaker 1: it's possible it's appeared some other language that I haven't found,
Speaker 1: but the earliest version of it in the English language
Speaker 1: press I could find was in the mid eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: in the Times of London, and it was actually a
Speaker 1: military term that meant something a little different. It was
Speaker 1: literally the concentration of forces, sort of getting ready for
Speaker 1: an offensive or a defensive move or a battle of
Speaker 1: some kind. So it had this military term for military
Speaker 1: people before it transitioned to mean concentrating non military people
Speaker 1: and doing this to civilians and isolating them from society
Speaker 1: in some way. The idea of the concentration of forces
Speaker 1: is usually associated with Napoleon's doctrine of war. Put a
Speaker 1: lot of troops together in the same spot and go
Speaker 1: for it, and you're likely to overwhelm your enemy. So
Speaker 1: it was the term being used by the Times of
Speaker 1: London to describe a place where troops could be brought
Speaker 1: together in preparation for some kind of a very focused
Speaker 1: and concentrated attack. Exactly. There's some connection between those ideas
Speaker 1: of concentration because if so, sort of fascinatingly, that connects
Speaker 1: up the whole idea of modernity and concentration camp, which
Speaker 1: will obviously get to with the idea of modern war doctrine,
Speaker 1: albeit in a very indirect way. Well it is indirect
Speaker 1: in that instance, but it's fairly direct. When we have
Speaker 1: the first decade of camps, they are all sort of
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety six and the ten years that follows. All
Speaker 1: these camps are part of a military objective. Initially, they
Speaker 1: are doing something to civilians as part of a war
Speaker 1: strategy to defeat some kind of insurgency, and so I
Speaker 1: think there's this very natural move that happens. It's a
Speaker 1: very unfortunate move, but you can see the evolution of
Speaker 1: this modern war strategy bleeding over into how civilians are
Speaker 1: going to be treated. And you know, there's this moment
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety six where we sort of get this
Speaker 1: idea reconcentration of civilians in Cuba under the Spanish Empire.
Speaker 1: But even before that you had Spanish generals and British
Speaker 1: generals talking about rounding people up, talking about using this
Speaker 1: as a widespread policy, and I'm sure it happened sometimes,
Speaker 1: but as a really definite war strategy that was very clear,
Speaker 1: and people understood that it would cause suffering to do
Speaker 1: this to civilians. That's at the very end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries when that idea emerges, and this eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: six moments in Cuba that you were describing, that's before
Speaker 1: the Spanish American Wars. What was the context and who
Speaker 1: was doing it in what language were they doing it in.
Speaker 1: So the Spanish Empire had Cuba as its colony for
Speaker 1: quite a long time, and Cubans had been resisting that
Speaker 1: for quite a long time, and really from the middle
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century to the Spanish American War itself,
Speaker 1: and then of course even after the Cuban people peasants
Speaker 1: mostly were seeking independence, and there were several rebellions that
Speaker 1: would sort of flare up and subside, and the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineties one flared up and the governor general there at
Speaker 1: the time said in a letter to Spain, Look, the
Speaker 1: only way we're going to really end this and defeat
Speaker 1: these guys is if we sweep all the peasants off
Speaker 1: the countryside, put them in fortified cities behind barbed wire,
Speaker 1: and burn the countryside. This is kind of a transitional
Speaker 1: version of the camp because what they're doing is they're
Speaker 1: pushing them out of the countryside and into cities that
Speaker 1: they're holding and so people could come and go from
Speaker 1: the town, but they had no means to eat. Their
Speaker 1: labor was basically agrarian labor. They didn't have skills that
Speaker 1: could be used in a city, and so you ended
Speaker 1: up with this very strange, bifurcated town where people on
Speaker 1: the edges were literally collapsing in the street and dying
Speaker 1: from disease and hunger, and the rest of the city
Speaker 1: was going on about its business. And so it isn't
Speaker 1: till the Bore War, which we get to very shortly after,
Speaker 1: that you have those sort of tense cities out from
Speaker 1: towns that we think of as a very classic version
Speaker 1: of what's going to come. What were the British actually
Speaker 1: trying to accomplish with their tense city concentration camps during
Speaker 1: the Boer War as they fought the Afrikaans speaking Boar's
Speaker 1: efforts at establishing their own state. Well, actually, when you
Speaker 1: look back at the war strategy in Cuba in Southern
Speaker 1: Africa at that time, it was quite similar. You were
Speaker 1: trying to defeat these sort of guerrilla forces and they
Speaker 1: were using barbed wire. And it's worth noting that the
Speaker 1: patenting and mass production of barbed wire is a really
Speaker 1: important piece of what made this kind of detention possible,
Speaker 1: because you just didn't need that many guards once you
Speaker 1: could really hold people. But the British were basically using
Speaker 1: barbed wire and the strategy of sectioning off parts of
Speaker 1: the terrain and then clearing it. And so if they
Speaker 1: could sort of clear an area and hold it, then
Speaker 1: they can move on to clear the next area. But
Speaker 1: in order to do that, they needed to make sure
Speaker 1: that people out in the countryside weren't feeding or harboring
Speaker 1: or hiding the people that were fighting them. And so
Speaker 1: the approach that was, well, let's just get rid of
Speaker 1: all the civilians entirely from the district. Andrea, you know,
Speaker 1: you said something fascinating in there. I mean, you've said
Speaker 1: many fascinating thing as already, but you mentioned that barbed
Speaker 1: wire was crucial to the process. That if you could
Speaker 1: put people behind barbed wire, which you could erect presumably
Speaker 1: very cheaply, unlike building a wall, then you could keep
Speaker 1: them there with fewer guards. And so as you were speaking,
Speaker 1: I just quickly googled and discovered what I had not known,
Speaker 1: which is that barbed wire was first patented in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven and then improved with a new patent in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy four, So barbed wire was pretty new as
Speaker 1: a technology. Would it be an exaggeration to say that
Speaker 1: without the technology of barbed wire we couldn't have had
Speaker 1: the modern concentration camp. And I think that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: I think the other thing we have to add in
Speaker 1: it wasn't quite as important in the first four or
Speaker 1: five years, but it became quite important later, was also
Speaker 1: the mass production of automatic weapons. Because if the barbed
Speaker 1: wire slows people ability to escape, and then you have
Speaker 1: guards that can kill a lot of people in a
Speaker 1: very short burst, then it sort of locks the prisoners
Speaker 1: inside the detention camp. And so I would say that
Speaker 1: between those two inventions and sort of mass productions, because
Speaker 1: it really had to be able to get a lot
Speaker 1: of it to a far flung place to make this work.
Speaker 1: There were other kinds of detention before, some of which
Speaker 1: were really close to what concentration camps would end up
Speaker 1: looking like Native American reservations in the US. We can
Speaker 1: think of as by far the very common precursor for
Speaker 1: concentration camps, and in some cases almost the only difference
Speaker 1: was this ability to detain people to actually hold them
Speaker 1: in place without assigning a huge guard force. And I
Speaker 1: think that that's where we cross the line over some
Speaker 1: equally horrific, sometimes more horrific versions of detention that happened
Speaker 1: previously slavery forced labor camps, Native American reservations. We cross
Speaker 1: into this modern idea of detention not to steal people's labor,
Speaker 1: not to steal their land, but detention behind barbed wire
Speaker 1: for detention's sake. That marks the concentration camp idea. The
Speaker 1: other thing that I thought was so fascinating when you
Speaker 1: were describing how the techniques of the British Hues and
Speaker 1: the Boer War were similar to those that the Spanish
Speaker 1: hues in eighteen ninety six in Cuba, was that it's
Speaker 1: a reminder that much as is the case today, where
Speaker 1: a theory of counterinsurgency becomes popular and then it spreads
Speaker 1: from one military to another military to another military. Similarly,
Speaker 1: already in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you had experimental military efforts to manage guerrilla warfarewell we
Speaker 1: today call insurgency, and one imperial power would imitate what
Speaker 1: another imperial power was doing. So it's sort of interesting
Speaker 1: to see ideas about military strategy, including the concentration camp
Speaker 1: moving from place to place. Well, there's two things with that,
Speaker 1: And I think that the idea of the moving is important.
Speaker 1: This is an international thing from very early on. At
Speaker 1: the same time, when you have the same tools, when
Speaker 1: you have the same kind of training and you have
Speaker 1: the same technology at your disposal, things also kind of
Speaker 1: independently spring up. So sometimes there's a direct influence and
Speaker 1: sometimes it's just everybody has a hammer at hand, and hey,
Speaker 1: you know what you can do with a hammer. I
Speaker 1: think that that's a fascinating thing. But the other thing
Speaker 1: is that you were talking about counterinsurgency strategy. Today we
Speaker 1: have so much concern and so much infrastructure built around
Speaker 1: dealing with this idea of terror and terrorism. It's important
Speaker 1: to note that concentration camps rise out of counterinsurgency strategy
Speaker 1: and they never really abandon it. What happens is that
Speaker 1: who is game goes from people in battle and people
Speaker 1: who might be actually showing up to shoot you or
Speaker 1: kill people in your view of what's happening in the world.
Speaker 1: It goes to people who are in society next to you,
Speaker 1: who aren't wielding web but are somehow undermining and destroying
Speaker 1: your society. But this idea of rooting out that dangerous
Speaker 1: dissident element that is going to destroy your society is
Speaker 1: at the heart of why concentration camps become acceptable and
Speaker 1: used and are used still today. That seems like an
Speaker 1: excellent point of transition to World War Two. And let's
Speaker 1: start with the Nazis use of concentration camps, and then
Speaker 1: we can also talk about the Japanese American internment camps.
Speaker 1: You hinted. I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, that
Speaker 1: from the idea that you gather up and concentrate and
Speaker 1: imprison behind barbed wire the people who you consider to
Speaker 1: be a threat in a counterinsurgency, you can naturally evolve
Speaker 1: to imprisoning the people whom you see as a threat
Speaker 1: because of who they are, and that could lead to
Speaker 1: the interment of political prisoners, which was the Nazis first move,
Speaker 1: and then ultimately to people who are seen as kind
Speaker 1: of existential enemies like the Jews. Is is that the
Speaker 1: process that took place in Germany? It is, But I
Speaker 1: think there's this transition moment we want to be sure
Speaker 1: not to skip, which is those first far flung colonial camps,
Speaker 1: which I will say held mostly women and children and
Speaker 1: had horrific death tolls I mean tens of thousands, more
Speaker 1: than one hundred thousand. That really shocked the world, and
Speaker 1: it was seen as a barbaric thing to use these camps.
Speaker 1: But what made it reasonable and by the time we
Speaker 1: got to the twenties or thirties for countries to start
Speaker 1: using them again, was that they were used in World
Speaker 1: War One. So it goes from this very discredited brutal
Speaker 1: strategy of military war in the battlefield areas to in
Speaker 1: World War One, the idea sprang up again and it
Speaker 1: moved from out in far flung areas into the centers
Speaker 1: of power. So you had detention camps. Let's say you
Speaker 1: were German and World War One broke out and you
Speaker 1: were in London, you were put into a camp there,
Speaker 1: you were put into a civilian camp in the area,
Speaker 1: and they had them in Berlin. And by the end
Speaker 1: of the war they had literally covered six continents and
Speaker 1: the Red Cross was investigating and visiting hundreds of different
Speaker 1: locations in dozens of countries. You had a bureaucracy of
Speaker 1: detention show up, and the death tolls from these camps
Speaker 1: because everybody wanted to be seen as running the ones
Speaker 1: that were fair and just. It was a real propaganda
Speaker 1: war that was going on. By the end of that war,
Speaker 1: they had rehabilitated the idea of this kind of detention
Speaker 1: and it was called concentration camps at the time. What
Speaker 1: we call it now is internment. And there was this
Speaker 1: idea that internment was a reasonable thing to do and
Speaker 1: that it didn't cause harm and that everybody didn't have
Speaker 1: to die. So after World War One, concentration camps are
Speaker 1: used everywhere. It becomes perfectly legitimate to lock up civilians
Speaker 1: in anywhere in the world, essentially, and that's where you
Speaker 1: end up with the early Soviet camps, and then in
Speaker 1: the thirties the Nazi camps. When they first began, they
Speaker 1: looked very much like something that had been done before.
Speaker 1: And I think the alarm bells did not go off
Speaker 1: in part because the Nazis hadn't yet figured out that
Speaker 1: camps would be at the heart of the genocide that
Speaker 1: they wanted to conduct. But also alarm bells didn't go
Speaker 1: off because people saw this, they had seen it all
Speaker 1: the time. It didn't look that different than things that
Speaker 1: they saw unfold around them in the twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: and during World War One, Andrew, can we talk about
Speaker 1: citizenship in that crucial transitional phase that you just described,
Speaker 1: because during World War One, correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: it seems as though these slightly better internment camps or
Speaker 1: concentration camps, the ones that were, as you said, rehabilitated
Speaker 1: the reputation of the camps were designed for basically civilians
Speaker 1: who were citizens of a country y're at war with,
Speaker 1: so an enemy's noncombatants. So was citizenship the primary criterion
Speaker 1: during World War One for the creation of these camps.
Speaker 1: It very much was. There's hundreds of years of laws
Speaker 1: on the books about in most countries use them about
Speaker 1: this idea of enemy aliens. If somebody is alien to
Speaker 1: your country and there's a war, you can do just
Speaker 1: about anything with them. And that's been true for a
Speaker 1: long time. But what was different that it had been
Speaker 1: more largely applied to individuals. So if you were an
Speaker 1: individual enemy alien in the eyes of the law, and
Speaker 1: there was some suspicion about you, there was great leeway
Speaker 1: in what could be done to you. But World War
Speaker 1: One marks this moment where you don't have to have
Speaker 1: individual suspicions about that person. We're going to apply that
Speaker 1: alien law to whole groups of people, regardless of their
Speaker 1: motivations or their actions, or whether you think their spy.
Speaker 1: We just are going to sort of push that over
Speaker 1: the brink and use that existing law, and we're going
Speaker 1: to lock up vast numbers of people. So then once
Speaker 1: you're willing to do that to one group of people,
Speaker 1: what history teaches us is you just have to find
Speaker 1: the group you want to target and either take away
Speaker 1: their citizenship or somehow move them outside those protections. And
Speaker 1: so from World War One on, the process really becomes
Speaker 1: how do you strip those rights of citizenship away from
Speaker 1: people so that you can do something to escapegoat them
Speaker 1: and lock them up. You're drawing a straight line year,
Speaker 1: I think too, we'll come back to the Nazis, but
Speaker 1: drawing a straight line here to the Japanese American internment camps,
Speaker 1: because after all, those included a combination of people with
Speaker 1: different kinds of legal status. They were naturalized people from
Speaker 1: Japan who are US citizens, there were some natural born
Speaker 1: US citizens who were the children of people from Japan.
Speaker 1: And then of course there were some people of the
Speaker 1: older generation who were in fact themselves still Japanese citizens
Speaker 1: and fit in some broader way under this enemy alien
Speaker 1: category because after all, the United States and Japan World War,
Speaker 1: but then all of those groups get lumped together in
Speaker 1: the exclusion order from the West Coast and then ultimately
Speaker 1: in the interment camps, which are actually called concentration camps.
Speaker 1: So that sounds like it's in connection with this idea
Speaker 1: of the enemy alien being being locked up. And obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, not to give too much of a spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: but we are going to talk a little bit later
Speaker 1: on about the contemporary camps of the United States is
Speaker 1: using to hold non citizens and undocumented persons. There's obviously
Speaker 1: a citizen ship component that's crucial there as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea of the alien and the citizen becomes so
Speaker 1: central to all of it. And it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: in World War Two as well, there was very little
Speaker 1: in the way of any threat from this community, and
Speaker 1: in fact, naval intelligence road to report saying we don't
Speaker 1: need to lock people up. And it's fascinating to me
Speaker 1: this history in which you had the Jay Edgar Hoover
Speaker 1: of the FBI against the idea of internment. You had
Speaker 1: the Attorney General at the time against the idea of internment.
Speaker 1: You had Roosevelt initially not wanting to run concentration camps
Speaker 1: to put this whole community in. But it became this
Speaker 1: political fight. It became some people argue an economic fight
Speaker 1: over the really productive and fertile lands that were being
Speaker 1: farmed by this community. And certainly what we see in
Speaker 1: every concentration camp setting arose here too, which was the
Speaker 1: useful vilification of a group of people. So if you
Speaker 1: vilify this group, if you demonize these groups, what can
Speaker 1: you extract from that politically? And it turned out there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people that could extract things politically,
Speaker 1: and so everybody thinks of this as a panic response.
Speaker 1: So we locked these people up in camps. That was wrong,
Speaker 1: but they didn't know better. They knew better, and it
Speaker 1: was this systemic thing that happens again and again with
Speaker 1: camps that sort of steamrolled it and took it the
Speaker 1: other direction toward incarceration. You mentioned earlier that in Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: the initial concentration of Jews was not focused yet on
Speaker 1: what came to be called the final solution of ultimately
Speaker 1: murdering and eliminating the Jews of Europe, but initially was
Speaker 1: part of a not exactly an anti insurgency strategy, because
Speaker 1: there was no Jewish insurgency, but rather of a let's
Speaker 1: gather up people who might we perceive as hostile to us.
Speaker 1: It's a long and complex story, but would you give
Speaker 1: us just a shortened version, a compressed version of how
Speaker 1: the concentration camps that you've been describing from the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineties through the nineteen thirties sort of bleed into the
Speaker 1: creation of actual death camps in World War Two. This
Speaker 1: is the question that is real at the heart of
Speaker 1: the issue that today people are wrestling with on what
Speaker 1: do you call a concentration camp? What gets to be
Speaker 1: called a concentration camp? And while that issue goes back
Speaker 1: actually more than one hundred years, people have debated this
Speaker 1: question these first years of Nazi camps, I think can
Speaker 1: help make it clearer for us. In those first years,
Speaker 1: it was a terror strategy employed by the Nazis to
Speaker 1: stifle descent, and I don't think most people realize that
Speaker 1: German Jews were not rounded up in groups to be
Speaker 1: sent to concentration camps until Kristallnacht near the end of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, So those camps existed for five years,
Speaker 1: five and a half years really before you had mass
Speaker 1: round up of Jews. What happens before then is exactly
Speaker 1: what you're saying, the rounding up of dissidents, the rounding
Speaker 1: up actually off homosexuals, the rounding up of people who
Speaker 1: were seen as vagrants, gypsies, what we would now today
Speaker 1: call roma and centie. People were rounded up that way.
Speaker 1: And in those first years, the Jews are being attacked
Speaker 1: by the Nazis in Germany, but it's mostly through the law.
Speaker 1: They are stripping them of citizenship. They are saying you
Speaker 1: can't work in a hospital, you can't use a hospital,
Speaker 1: you can't hold a professorship at a public university. And
Speaker 1: it isn't until I believe, and certainly there's room for
Speaker 1: a lot of different ideas. But after Kristall knocked, when
Speaker 1: they arrested tens of thousands of Jews and held them
Speaker 1: in camps, that the world really didn't do anything, and
Speaker 1: they ended up releasing. Actually those first five years and
Speaker 1: even after Kristall, more than ninety percent of those Jews
Speaker 1: were released, there was horrible violence done. Some people were killed,
Speaker 1: so I'm not minimizing that terror of the Jewish community
Speaker 1: at all, But even then, the camps were not an
Speaker 1: extermination tool at that point. It isn't until they still
Speaker 1: have members of the Jewish community that are not leaving,
Speaker 1: and at that point they can't leave. No countries will
Speaker 1: take them. There's almost no country that is willing to
Speaker 1: harbor Jews at that point, and the Nazis realized that
Speaker 1: they're not going to be able to push this community
Speaker 1: out of Germany. And then, of course, when Hitler invades
Speaker 1: Germany is moving through terrain in which there are whole
Speaker 1: towns that are majority Jewish. So instead of the one
Speaker 1: or two percent that are estimated German Jews who have
Speaker 1: been before the war, they suddenly have these vast Jewish
Speaker 1: communities to deal with, and what are they going to
Speaker 1: do with that? And this is where we end up
Speaker 1: with the debate that resolves in the idea of this
Speaker 1: final solution. And I don't think you can get to
Speaker 1: that death camp system without those concentration camps being opened
Speaker 1: for years beforehand, with them developing strategies, with them looking
Speaker 1: at tactics and techniques of control, and starting to experiment
Speaker 1: with how do you kill a lot of people. I
Speaker 1: don't think that you can get to the death camps
Speaker 1: without having those non death camps in place. And it's
Speaker 1: those non death camps that I'm calling concentration camps, because
Speaker 1: the extermination camps were simply meant to kill as many
Speaker 1: people as quickly as he could, bringing bodies in, executing them,
Speaker 1: and getting the bodies out. In fact, I remember, actually
Speaker 1: very vidly when I was a student, having an older
Speaker 1: scholar explained to me why it was that we hear
Speaker 1: the name Auschwitz all the time. Was the largest of
Speaker 1: the concentration camps ultimately, and so rarely hear the names
Speaker 1: of camps which were pure extermination camps like Bell Jettes
Speaker 1: would be a great example of one that's not a
Speaker 1: household name, but at which hundreds of thousands of Jews
Speaker 1: were murdered. And he explained to me that the reason
Speaker 1: was that many many people survived Auschwitz when liberation took place,
Speaker 1: that is to say, many people died. Of course, huge
Speaker 1: numbers of people died, but when liberation came, they were
Speaker 1: still people alive because it was a labor camp, not
Speaker 1: purely a deathcamp. There was an attached death camp as well,
Speaker 1: but at a place like bell Jets, ninety nine point
Speaker 1: nine percent of the people who came through the door
Speaker 1: were immediately murdered, and so there weren't survivors to say
Speaker 1: I survived this camp, or tiny numbers of survivors, and
Speaker 1: so as a consequence, those are not as salient in
Speaker 1: our minds. And I think that I've always thought that
Speaker 1: that may be partly the explanation for why in popular
Speaker 1: language we often don't distinguish concentration camps or deathcamp from deathcamps.
Speaker 1: It's because the survivors whom we were fortunate enough to
Speaker 1: know were mostly survivors of concentration camps rather than of
Speaker 1: pure death camps. I think you're absolutely right. Auschwitz represents
Speaker 1: something that in people's minds is the epitome of the
Speaker 1: death camp, but it actually is one that made the
Speaker 1: transition and continued as a concentration camp even while it
Speaker 1: was a death camp. And I think that that's the
Speaker 1: lesson to learn, is that it is actually possible to
Speaker 1: go from one to the other. And while I don't
Speaker 1: think the particular centuries old hatred of Jews and political
Speaker 1: manipulation of that that happened worldwide, especially in Europe in
Speaker 1: the centuries before the Holocaust is going to be replicated
Speaker 1: in the US, or in Russia or in China. I
Speaker 1: think that there are pre existing hatreds and prejudices everywhere,
Speaker 1: and even if we think that they will never culminate
Speaker 1: in something like the deaths that happened in the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: Auschwitz is this instrumental point to realize that it is
Speaker 1: possible to make that leap. And why would we want
Speaker 1: to have the concentration camp there as the setting from
Speaker 1: which something more horrible can come? So now I want
Speaker 1: to transition Andrea from this fascinating, important, searing history to
Speaker 1: the contemporary political debate over the border detention facilities that
Speaker 1: the US has built and has been using extensively. In
Speaker 1: recent months and years. You've been very vocal, as someone
Speaker 1: who has written the leading history on this, about how
Speaker 1: you see these current internment camps. In the New York
Speaker 1: Review of Books, for example, you wrote a piece the
Speaker 1: title was quote some suburb of Hell America's new concentration
Speaker 1: camp system. Did first of all, did they give you
Speaker 1: a say in that title? Was it where at least
Speaker 1: have supervisory authority? I did not, which is normal in journalism.
Speaker 1: So I don't. I don't take issue with that. Often
Speaker 1: don't get to pick your headlines, but I don't have
Speaker 1: a problem. Yeah, but you're okay with it. So tell us,
Speaker 1: first of all, what your position has been on the
Speaker 1: obviously extraordinarily contentious question of how these terms should be
Speaker 1: used today. So, the definition in my book of a
Speaker 1: concentration camp was the masked attention of civilians without trial
Speaker 1: on the basis of identity, and that could be a
Speaker 1: religious identity, political identity, racial or ethnic identity. And so literally,
Speaker 1: from the moment that President Trump declared his candidacy came
Speaker 1: down the escalator. We immediately heard in twenty fifteen the
Speaker 1: rhetoric of Mexicans as rapists. I mean, we soon got
Speaker 1: into this question of how many people was he actually
Speaker 1: calling animals that were souves of the border, and arguments
Speaker 1: over how big that group was. But this dehumanizing rhetoric
Speaker 1: of people over the southern border literally started from the
Speaker 1: moment the candidacy began. And when you have somebody with
Speaker 1: a clear animus, it really sets the tone for something
Speaker 1: that is very clearly a policy of exclusion and elimination
Speaker 1: and really motivated by the very profound things that have
Speaker 1: started concentration camps. And so if everything we're allowed to
Speaker 1: operate without that animus and without that motivating factor, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't get to what we have. You don't get to
Speaker 1: what we have by having a rational, realistic decision about
Speaker 1: what is the best way to do this, Although that
Speaker 1: would be disputed by if we had someone you know,
Speaker 1: in the studio from the Department of Homeland Security, from
Speaker 1: the Trumpama decision, they would say something different. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I would buy it, but they would
Speaker 1: clearly take the view that there is genuinely a huge
Speaker 1: number of people crossing the border, that there is a
Speaker 1: need to detain because otherwise people will will escape into
Speaker 1: the into the United States and will not be found.
Speaker 1: I mean, and that once you're detaining large numbers of people,
Speaker 1: you need some mechanism for doing so. Again, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying we have to accept that argument, but they would
Speaker 1: make that argument. And so it seems worrisome to me
Speaker 1: that we would use the term concentration camp or not
Speaker 1: use it based on who's right on the facts of
Speaker 1: whether these camps are in fact necessary. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to take this on in a very practical,
Speaker 1: serious way, like to not just be throwing the word
Speaker 1: concentration camp around in some willy nilly fashion. When you
Speaker 1: are dealing with surges at the border, when you are
Speaker 1: looking at some of the situations that have arisen historically,
Speaker 1: it might be almost impossible to deal with them without
Speaker 1: having people housed somewhere for some period of hours or days. Literally.
Speaker 1: Having any immigration system is probably predicated on having people
Speaker 1: in a place for some period of time. But the
Speaker 1: crossing over of that is that the detention becomes the point.
Speaker 1: I mean, even people coming into Ellis Island would have
Speaker 1: to wait sometimes for processing if they family members certainly did. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean, so I want to be clear that
Speaker 1: it isn't just like who's presenting which facts. It is
Speaker 1: literally immigration is a process that often would require holding
Speaker 1: people while their process for some period of days or
Speaker 1: some you know, some small manageable period when the goal
Speaker 1: is clearly to move them through that process. But wouldn't
Speaker 1: wouldn't the Trump administrations say the point is not to detain.
Speaker 1: We would much prefer to send all of the people
Speaker 1: in these facilities back where they came from. That's the
Speaker 1: administration's stated goal, but they would say, because of international
Speaker 1: and US law that requires processing and requires in some
Speaker 1: circumstances a hearing if someone makes a claim to asylum,
Speaker 1: we're therefore stuck with these detention centers. So you say
Speaker 1: the point is detention, and they would say the point
Speaker 1: is not detention. We would rather not detain anybody, but
Speaker 1: it's the legal system that's requiring us too. The thing
Speaker 1: about that is that everything that has happened since twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen has pointed the meaning of what they're doing not
Speaker 1: to things that solve practice coal matters, but to punitive measures.
Speaker 1: We had John Kelly talking months before the family separation
Speaker 1: policy was put in place that they might do it
Speaker 1: as a deterrence. Something that is a deterrence is a
Speaker 1: punitive approach to keep people, to make it have a
Speaker 1: cost to do something. In addition, when those policies that
Speaker 1: were first paid attention to last year, in the first
Speaker 1: half of last year, that kind of culminated in the
Speaker 1: family separation policy a little over a year ago, there
Speaker 1: was not the surge that we are having now. That is,
Speaker 1: in part a byproduct these things were done in advance
Speaker 1: of the larger numbers coming. You did not see the
Speaker 1: big waves that we've been having in recent months that
Speaker 1: some people are attributing to Trump's discussions of closing the
Speaker 1: border in this fear that they may not be able
Speaker 1: to get in if they don't get in now. And
Speaker 1: so I think it's disingenuous to say we're doing this
Speaker 1: because of the numbers. But I want to be honest
Speaker 1: and fair that a mass immigration system, you're going to
Speaker 1: have to have people housed somewhere, And difference between that
Speaker 1: and a concentration camp is in part, how long are
Speaker 1: you holding them? Is it indefinite? Is there a plan
Speaker 1: will they be released? And do they know when they
Speaker 1: will be released? And is there a punitive aspect to it?
Speaker 1: And if detention, if mass detention is the point of
Speaker 1: the thing, which it is here because the Trump administration
Speaker 1: has been detaining all kinds of people that these children
Speaker 1: that it could release, that have relatives in the US
Speaker 1: that are waiting to deal with them. If it were
Speaker 1: a priority, if they wanted to make it happen, they
Speaker 1: would not need to be doing this. There's I believe
Speaker 1: that there is a very public detention centered aspect in
Speaker 1: which they're trying to focus that, but also the idea
Speaker 1: that you could just leave, which a lot of people say.
Speaker 1: I have talked to border reporters who have said no.
Speaker 1: Some people have said, oh my god, don't take my
Speaker 1: child from me. We will leave, and it's too late.
Speaker 1: They can't do it. So this idea that they are
Speaker 1: just allowed to go is not true. It's not accurate. Andrea,
Speaker 1: I just want to close with a different angle of
Speaker 1: critique that comes not from people who say that the
Speaker 1: trumpa Indmistration doesn't intend to create concentration camps, but who say,
Speaker 1: we share your sense that this is a terrible moral wrong,
Speaker 1: but we believe that the term concentration camp, notwithstanding the
Speaker 1: history that you've uncovered, has such a close tie to
Speaker 1: the horrors of the Holocaust, and arguably, some would say
Speaker 1: to the unique circumstances of the Holocaust, the association of
Speaker 1: the concentration camps with death camps, that therefore we shouldn't
Speaker 1: use the terminology, not because we should be careful about
Speaker 1: using that to condemn the United States, but rather because
Speaker 1: we should be protecting the unique legacy of circumstances of
Speaker 1: historical historical memory. What's your thought on that line. I
Speaker 1: think if people out of respect for memorializing the millions murdered,
Speaker 1: really unparalleled thing in history, you know, in the camps
Speaker 1: of the Holocaust. If they want to not use that
Speaker 1: term themselves, understand that impulse, and I respect that, But
Speaker 1: for myself, there is forty years of history of things
Speaker 1: called concentration camps that the world has largely forgotten that
Speaker 1: are how we got to the Holocaust. And to not
Speaker 1: realize that the Holocaust was made possible by these earlier
Speaker 1: camps that were concentration camps that we are repeating the
Speaker 1: history of today. I think by not naming that erases
Speaker 1: that history in a way that makes the Holocaust seem
Speaker 1: as if it happened from nowhere, which is a really
Speaker 1: dangerous historical idea. But also knowing that we are repeating
Speaker 1: that history and calling these concentration camps tells us something
Speaker 1: about what is going to happen next, because we have
Speaker 1: a lot of case studies from those early camps and
Speaker 1: we can have a pretty good idea of where things
Speaker 1: will go. And by not calling them that, I think
Speaker 1: we'd look away from the likelihood of what is going
Speaker 1: to happen next. In what we're doing today. Andrea, thank
Speaker 1: you for that very thoughtful and I think, in many
Speaker 1: ways powerful response to that concern, and thank you for
Speaker 1: your historical work in clarifying the very complex history of
Speaker 1: concentration camps. I think we're much better off for understanding
Speaker 1: and gathering what that history shows. Well, thank you for
Speaker 1: the chance to talk. Listening to Andrea, I was gripped
Speaker 1: by two strongly competing impulses. On the one hand, as
Speaker 1: I understood more deeply the history of the concentration camp
Speaker 1: itself and where it came from, I was really struck
Speaker 1: by the ways that any massed attention of civilians can
Speaker 1: credibly be considered a concentration camp. Andrea is right when
Speaker 1: she says that without an understanding of that history, we
Speaker 1: can't understand where the Nazi camps came from, and that
Speaker 1: it's very important to keep that history in mind as
Speaker 1: we remember that many concentration camps are not death camps,
Speaker 1: but our camps started, albeit for political reasons, by any
Speaker 1: government that's trying to detain large numbers of people in
Speaker 1: order to protect itself. On the other hand, I was
Speaker 1: also powerfully influenced by the consistent feeling that most concentration
Speaker 1: camps throughout history have been designed to have some transformational
Speaker 1: effect on a piece of territory, that they're designed to
Speaker 1: move people off of one piece of land to take
Speaker 1: over some piece of land. And that's not really the
Speaker 1: case for the migrant internment camps and facilities that the
Speaker 1: United States has been creating, because after all, the goal
Speaker 1: of those camps is, even if one has the most
Speaker 1: critical view, to move people out of the United States
Speaker 1: ultimately going forward, what we need to do when we
Speaker 1: look at and understand the conditions, often the terrible conditions
Speaker 1: in these facilities, is to make sure, as a democracy
Speaker 1: that believes in human rights, that nobody is being detained
Speaker 1: in those facilities for punitive reasons, and that the conditions
Speaker 1: in those facilities don't even begin in to approach the
Speaker 1: terrible conditions that have been present in concentration camps over
Speaker 1: the last century. The more we do to communicate that,
Speaker 1: the less likely history is to attach the terrible term
Speaker 1: of concentration camp to these facilities. Deep Background is brought
Speaker 1: to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Geancott,
Speaker 1: with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis
Speaker 1: GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob
Speaker 1: Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is deep
Speaker 1: background