Comment by einr

> Here's one of these camps, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_East_Montana

Thats a textbook concentration camp. You are correct in your descriptions and distinction from extermination camps, concentration camps are not that rare even these days around the world in troubled places.

They are as name suggests just to herd bunch of people behind the fence, not much more. Of course, the reasons are usually far from nice and thus due to at most OKish treatment even there some sad things happen due to amount of people crammed together for a long time.

In Europe during WWII we had tons of concentration camps all over conquered Europe but only few were actual extermination ones, usually converted/expanded from concentration ones. When allies were coming nazis often turned concentration -> extermination due to orders given from above.

Thank you for the clarification!

I do agree that there are three slight between "concentration", "death", and "extermination" camps when speaking about Nazi Germany. In France virtually only "concentration" is used in history classes as an umbrella term for all three. It's only very recently (less than 5 years) that I've seen people start to use the more nuanced term. (as an example, any French will tell you that Auschwitz is a concentration camp while it was, in fact, a death camp).

Yet I stand behind what I said about the word "concentration camp" be a strong and heavy word, since those were integral part in the final solution.

I'm not denying that the US has detainment camps akin to the "gentlest" camps from Nazi Germany, far from it. However, I fail to see the difference between e.g. the East Montana one and a large-scale 5k inmate prison, other than it's less regulated than a federal/regular prison thus with more abuse, and filled with regular people instead of criminals. According to the linked Wikipedia articles, the camp has been dubbed after the Alcatraz prison (known for all sorts of violations).

I may be wrong, and they may be indeed set up by ICE and the government to torture and kill the immigrants. I have a hard time to believe it though, as making a detainment camp to frighten and push immigrants to "go back" would me much more effective and less controversial. My guess would be the intent is the latter form of facility, but ends up being the former due to being staffed with ICE and not professional prison crew.

At any rate, even having detainment camps for non-convicted civilians is already too much. We're quick to point fingers at China and their labor camps for Uyghurs, but this is on the way. (as with the Nazi discussion, this is still far from what china does: ad-vitam detainment, children born in captivity, forced sterilization of people, forced religion, etc).

> Nazis were systemic against a religion and disabilities.

Just a note that Nazism was systemic primarily about a race: atheists with ethnically Jewish backgrounds were targeted, converts were few but they would have been considered 'Aryans'. It's an important distinction because many groups (specifically the Muslim Brotherhood) try and draw false equivalence between their beliefs and actual innate characteristics.